A Step Farther Out (42 page)

Yet it's very hard to find any kind of rational discussion of nuclear energy.

Item: a science fiction writer friend, a lady I respect, called on me the other day. She wanted a dramatic incident in a story. How, she asked, might a character cause a nuclear explosion—not a large one, just a little one—at the San Onofre nuclear plant?

I told her to have her character carry an atom bomb into the plant. It's the only way I know of Beware of the guards, and recall that San Onofre is on a US Marine base. Where they get the atom bomb I don't know.

But—isn't there another way? Another lady, a radio broadcaster specializing in "conservation" and "environment" and "concern" and the like was present at the discussion and was certain that San Onofre could be made to go up like a bomb. Just cut the cooling water supply.

She wasn't very interested in hearing of the actual engineering details of the plant—feedwater supply which could be used for emergency cooling; the emergency cooling system itself; etc. Nor was my SF writer friend, who went away disappointed and muttering about how she could fake it, since the public wouldn't know about all the safety precautions.

Item: A book published by the Reader's Digest and widely touted: WE ALMOST LOST DETROIT. Never mind that we didn't almost lose anything, at Detroit (where a couple of fuel elements of the Fermi research reactor melted, the safety devices worked as they should have, and everything shut down with neither disaster nor danger of one) or at Brown's Ferry (where a twit using a candle to search for leaks set insulation afire and caused the plant to be shut down in an orderly manner).

Item: a review of WE ALMOST LOST DETROIT published in the
New York Times Book Review.
Written by a staff lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, the review states, "They knew what the public did not—a mistake could trigger a nuclear explosion." Do I need to repeat it? If a horde of terrorists had taken possession of Fermi reactor and used hammers and hacksaws they could not have triggered a nuclear explosion.

Item: the last time I had a kind word about nuclear power, there came in the mail from a windmill experimenter a letter that opened with obscenities. When I wrote him to ask what contribution that made to the discussion, he said that I as a writer ought to understand that this was the only way he could express what he felt. He enclosed some more obscenities, presumably to deliver himself of more of his feelings; and did not seem to understand that I didn't invent the wind figures, nor are his "feelings" particularly important to the universe. I hope he sells lots of windmills, but he can't change the energy picture much by doing it.

(Incidentally, why he thought an old soldier would be shocked by anatomical obscenities is beyond me. Perhaps he thought my wife would open the mail—she sometimes does—and that he'd impress her? Unlikely. Despite my misgivings, Mrs. Pournelle teaches in a juvenile detention facility, and I suspect she could, given enough provocation, shock the windmill designer out of his socks.)

Item: Jack Anderson, in a dazzling display of journalistic integrity, says in a recent column: "The clouds originate from six mammoth, cylindrical cooling towers that rise from the banks of the Ohio River like idols to the gods of energy. Superheated [sic] vapors from the nuclear works below form the clouds which appear so white and innocent. But they hang over Shippingport like a pall. Beneath them is a dying town contaminated by. . . deadly irradiated mist."

Would you believe he's talking about Ohio River water trickled down through cellotex? At the bottom of the tower there is a heat exchanger which connects with the condenser at the low-temp side of the turbines. No connection with the reactor at all, and the towers would be there whether Shippingport was fired by coal, oil, natural gas, or uranium; but you'd never know that from Anderson, who is terrified of fluffy white clouds composed of—water vapor and nothing else.

Item:
Time
magazine's recent report on 'The atom's global garbage," which states baldly that there is no technology for disposing of nuclear wastes. Evidently the editors of
Time
do not even read
Scientific American,
for in the June 1977 issue of
SA
there is a very complete article on the disposal of reactor wastes.

Look, can we once and for all dispose of the idiotic view that there is no place to put nuclear wastes? The technology is already proven: they can be reduced to solids imbedded in glass. The total volume from the invention of the first reactor to the most optimistic (in my view) construction program of reactors extending to the year 2000 is a cube under 100 feet on a side; in fact, if the world ran off nuclear reactors exclusively, then in 50,000 years we would have enough wastes to cover about one square mile to a depth of six feet.

There are a lot of square miles of desert in this world; and at the lowest level of technology imaginable those wastes can be stored in concrete structures in the Mojave, where they are completely recoverable if needed—and they just might be.

In the early days of this century, oil companies distilled off only the higher-grade volatiles from crude. The resulting sludge was a mess, and it was expensive to get rid of. One oil company executive ordered the company's director of research to think of something better to do with crude sludge than simply storing it.

The result was the petrochemical industry: plastics, "coal-tar derivatives," and such. Think about that the next time someone mentions "nuclear wastes."

And as for plutonium, it's more valuable than gold; why should it be stored anywhere? The value of already-mined uranium in this land is something like a
trillion
dollars, given that we go ahead with the breeder program—Except that we won't. However, the Soviets, French, Germans, British, and Japanese are already doing so. Perhaps we will export uranium? Instead of using it to fuel our own reactors, we can sell uranium and buy Arab oil. Marvelous.

Now I don't mean to imply that there is no such thing as intelligent opposition to nuclear power; but there is very little of that. The above is a far better illustration of the nuclear debate.

But, perhaps we will have to do without nuclear power, not on rational grounds, but because people are afraid? Not if you ask the people. The anti-nuclear forces have yet to win a major referendum—but there are fewer and fewer nuclear plants ordered, and our nuclear reactor industry is liquidating itself, because it takes 63—
sixty-three—
separate permits to construct a nuclear plant, and very few companies can afford the delays and the legal fees required. As a means of subsidizing lawyers the present nuclear regulation system is well designed—but is there not perhaps a cheaper method of rewarding legal diligence? It would probably be cheaper to give each law-school graduate a guaranteed salary of $50,000 a year on the condition that he (or she) not practice law.

Incidentally, the total output of
Time
magazine for 8 months takes up more space than would all our nuclear wastes from 1944 to the year 2000. (Figure courtesy of Petr Beckmann.)

* * *

Obviously, then, my "ideal" energy policy would remove a number of the constraints surrounding nuclear power plants. I would
not
relax the safety regulations, nor would I leave plant site location to "experts" without discussion; but surely the number of permits can be reduced to four or five, and the time required to get a permit cut from five-plus years to one year.

I would also do the same for coal; there is no reason why our fuels decisions should be made on the basis of regulatory difficulty and red tape, instead of economics. Utility companies, both public and privately owned, have plenty of talent for deciding what kinds of plants they ought to build; why not let them employ it? But at the moment the Department of Energy will have a budget of $10 billion, and very little of that will go into any kind of meaningful research.

* * *

Obviously a meaningful energy policy must do more than streamline the permit system. Coal and nuclear power can get us to the year 2000, and it's hard to see anything else that can; but no one genuinely loves either as a power source. Both have drawbacks, and I'm as aware of them as anyone. I would not care to leave my grandchildren the same problems I face.

What, then, should we do for the intermediate and long terms?

Well, first, you make certain there will be
something that
works, which is why I like nuclear power; it's a proven technology with, in my judgment, fewer problems than coal. But having insured there will be power, you look for better systems.

I think few would argue: one excellent power source is natural gas. Natural gas is a wonder fuel: it's clean, it is easily and economically transported, the distribution system (pipelines) already exists; it can be employed in a conservation strategy, that is, by decentralizing power generation so that on-site plants can provide both steam and electricity for major industries and compact bedroom communities. The only problem with gas is that we're running out of it faster than anything else (and, of course, it does produce CO
₂
and add to the Earth's heat burden; more on that later).

There may be a source of gas so large as to be nearly incredible. The estimated conventional reserves of natural gas in US fields is 6 billion cubic meters; and we'll run out far too soon, unless we find and develop more.

But that's conventional fields. There are now known to exist "geo-pressure zones"; these are large pockets of water, at very high temperature and pressure, saturated with gas. I quote from the 1977 ANNUAL REVIEW OF ENERGY: "In the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico (onshore and offshore), the only area in the world where detailed studies of geo-pressure zones have been undertaken, an area of 375,000 km
²
is believed to contain a large belt of geo-pressure zones, some going down to a depth of 16,000 meters (16 kilometers). The large quantity of gas in this belt is estimated at 1300 trillion cubic meters (roughly 1800 billion metric tons coal equivalent, comparable to entire US coal resources); other estimates, such as the one of Dorfman at 160 trillion cubic meters, are more modest, but still impressive.

"Throughout the world, many geo-pressure zones of the depositional or the tectonic-occurrence types have been identified, but no estimates of their methane potential have been made. If appropriately tapped, the methane resources can provide, in addition to the natural gas dissolved, enormous amounts of mechanical and geothermal energies from the pressures in excess of 500 kg/cm
²
and temperatures above 200°C at depths of 6000-7000 meters."

There are also gas hydrates, known as "frozen natural gas," discovered by Soviet petroleum geologists in the last few years, and also investigated by the US exploration ship
Glomar Challenger.
The Soviets estimate—are you ready for this?—that one million trillion, repeat, 10
⁶
trillion cubic meters of methane can be found in frozen reserves throughout the world's oceans.

The ANNUAL REVIEW adds, "commercial recovery of gas from submarine hydrate is probably a very difficult task." This is why I do not put hydrates down as a near-term insurance fuel source; it is risky technology.

The same is true, but to a far lesser extent, for the geo-pressure zones. Drilling to 6 kilometers is difficult but has been done; extracting the dissolved gas from the pressurized water is again tricky, but off the-shelf technology. Within a few years we could have plenty of natural gas.

If someone goes after it.
The simplest way to develop this resource would be to decontrol the price of natural gas; our fuel bills would be higher (but no higher than they'll be after Carter's energy taxes!) and plenty of developers, motivated by good old reliable greed, will break their arses trying to get natural gas to sell.

Another way, one less preferable in my judgment but defensible, would be to have a government development program—which would in practice mean contracting with private firms to do the work, because the expertise exists outside ERDA, not in it.

What we're doing, though, is ignoring the whole situation in favor of taxes and a complicated income-redistribution scheme; and
that,
in my view, is mindless.

Perhaps Carter doesn't know about geo-pressure zones? But surely
someone
does. So why is this whole technology resource ignored in the President's war on energy resources?

* * *

For the long term we cannot continue to rely on, fossil fuels. There are perfectly legitimate conservation reasons-such as CO
₂
buildup, and the overall heat balance of Earth—for looking to other energy sources, and probably the best way to have those taken into account is to plan
now
while someone still cares. Given our present war on energy, the day will soon dawn when no one will give a damn about conservation, and we will go to a crash program to strip-mine coal, dig up pressurized gas, build nuclear plants, and to hell with the consequences. At the moment few outside the "snow belt" during the Great Freeze of '76 have felt a real energy pinch; we are wealthy enough to give some thought for "the environment."

The poor—and that certainly includes those rich by world standards but poor compared to their own past—generally do not care about long-term consequences.

If we have a long-term goal of eliminating fossil fuels, there are only two ways to go: nuclear fusion, and some form of solar power.

Fusion has received short shrift from Carter exactly at the time when the most scientific progress has been made. The program moved ahead, they have made neutrons in reactors, and they are ready to move to breakeven, the point at which the experiment produces more power than it consumes—only they need more equipment, and they need to keep their staffs together, and Carter's budget has provision for neither.

Obviously my "ideal" energy program restores the fusion budget at least to what President Ford recommended.

There are three ways to go with solar; Earth-based, space-based, and agricultural. The latter is a kind of Earth-based solar power accumulator, of course, but uses a different kind of expertise; biologists and agronomists rather than engineers and physicists.