On the way back from Hartford yesterday I turned on PBS because Fridays generally feature a science program. The program was about climate change and the person being interviewed was the Associate Director of the Sierra Club. The topic revolved around the present political situation and the consensus that very little is likely to occur in the next few years due to the lack of credibility of science in today’s political world. Up until this point I agreed with his analysis and awaited the disclosure of what the Sierra Club intended to push over the next few years.
I should state that I am a former member of the Sierra Club and was a member for a number of years. I left when I felt they had become to radicalized and had lost touch with reality. A number of others left including the former Chairman Ansel Adams who was a founding member. Having said that I still felt they still were a positive force for the environmental movement.
He stated their primary goal was to prevent the construction of new “dirty coal plants” and he talked about the health problems of breathing the contaminated air from their smokestacks. He then went on to say we have to replace these plants with “Green Energy” from solar and wind; totally ignoring nuclear power and natural gas. He chose to ignore the fact that photovoltaic solar plants are still not cost competitive and wind power is feasible in only a few areas of the country. Even where photovoltaic is feasible; the desert southwest for example we have to deal with the problem of power storage. The sun does not shine at night and we do not have a way to store large amounts of power for nighttime use.
From an engineering point of view the solutions to excess carbon dioxide generation and air pollution are economically and environmentally feasible NOW. If we were to build no new coal fired power plants and replace them with gas fired and nuclear plants we can reduce carbon dioxide emission by 60-70% and not increase our cost of generation. Over the last ten years we have discovered enough natural gas to keep its cost low for the foreseeable future. Nuclear power plants are expensive to construct because of the regulatory process not because of the cost of power generation. Standardizing the design of the nuclear core, and building smaller generators would go a long way to lower the total cost of nuclear power.
The gorilla in the room is the states with large amounts of coal and the enormous economic cost to them if we simply discontinued the use of coal. Again there is a straightforward engineering solution which will both reduce our dependence on foreign oil and increase the efficiency of auto engines. Coal can be converted to diesel fuel using a process which was originally developed in Europe in the 1930”s. Modern clean burning diesel engines are 40% more efficient than gasoline engines and when combined with the new generation of 6 speed transmissions are capable of lowering fuel consumption by 50%.
These are all steps we can take now using proven technology while we develop the technologies for the future. Modern construction techniques allow us to build environmentally friendly home with energy use a small fraction of what we were able to accomplish just a few years ago. Combine this with commonsense home size and we can dramatically reduce our carbon footprint without sacrificing comfort.
The solutions Proposed here are being used primarily in Europe although China has undertaken a massive Coal to diesel plant and they are just starting to build a new generation of nuclear power plants. Biofuels will become an important source of future transportation and ultimately fusion power will be our power of the future. At that time when power is truly cheap electric cars will make sense. Today’s expensive electric cars depend on inefficient power generation and like ethanol are mindless solutions to a very serious problem.
I worked on the design of thermoelectric and thermionic power generators for space applications and worked on the design of two advanced technology nuclear power generators.
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