Power Hungry (44 page)

Rhodes and Beller made an essential point: The discussion about nuclear power has devolved to the point where it is akin to the debates over some of the most controversial issues of our time. The abortion and evolution debates are ruled by emotion and faith, not rationality. When it comes to nuclear power, the United States must undertake a relentlessly logical approach, one that depends on facts. It must also embrace the development of emerging nuclear technologies such as modular reactors, thorium fuel, and other reactor concepts. If it does so, then nuclear power, as Rhodes and Beller concluded, will undoubtedly be seen as one of the best available long-term solutions to our energy challenges.

Rethinking “Green” and a Few Other Suggestions

I
STILL REMEMBER the first time I mixed blue paint with yellow paint. The result, of course, was a revelation to my young eyes: green.

Today, more than four and a half decades later, I'm eager to return to simpler ideas about what is, and isn't, green. Over the past few years, the concept of “green-ness” has become so overused as to become devoid of meaning. As I hope this book has helped to make clear, most, or perhaps all, of the renewable energy push, and in particular, the push for more wind power, is based on the bogus notion that those sources are “greener” than hydrocarbons such as oil and natural gas. That's simply not true.

All the blather about “green” has fostered the delusion that we can get our energy on the cheap, without any environmental impacts at all. Again, that's just not true. Sure, the idea of wind turbines might have a certain charm, and arrays of solar panels might make our cities and towns look like settings for science-fiction films. And if only we could just get a few coal-fired power plants to belch a rainbow every once in a while, they might look kind of pretty, too. But the hard truth is that energy production is not pretty, cheap, or easy.

Although I have attacked many of the claims about alternative energy, it's clear that the push for renewable energy has lots of momentum. The industry has captured much of the public's imagination, and that means that sources such as wind and solar will continue their rapid growth. Between now and 2030, the International Energy Agency expects that some $5.5 trillion will be spent on renewable energy projects,
¹
and by the end of that period, renewables could be providing 10 percent of the world's primary energy needs.
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Significant strides are being made in reducing the cost of solar power. In early 2009, First Solar, one of America's biggest producers of photovoltaic cells, said it had reduced its manufacturing costs to about $1 per watt, a key threshold for economic viability.
³
And in August 2009, eSolar, a thermal-solar company, christened a facility in the California desert that the company claims has higher power densities than similar solar projects and does so at lower cost.
⁴

In mid-2009, the desire to find alternative motor fuels led Exxon Mobil to team up with California-based Synthetic Genomics to study photosynthetic algae. The deal calls for the oil giant to invest up to $600 million in the project.
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Although algae-based fuels are many years away from being commercially viable, other alternative energy technologies are making progress. In November 2009, a California-based company, SolarReserve, announced plans to build a concentrated solar farm that will use molten salt to store energy. The company claims that it will be able to store up to seven hours of the project's solar energy in the form of molten salt.
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Meanwhile, Dow Chemical has developed a solar roof shingle for the residential market that the company claims can be installed just like asphalt shingles to form an array. They are cheaper than conventional photovoltaic panels, Dow says, and could “offset between 40 percent and 80 percent of a home's electricity consumption.”
⁷
Another intriguing possibility: spray-on solar cells. Researchers in the United States, Australia, Canada, and Switzerland are working on plastic coatings that contain tiny particles of titanium, copper, gallium, and indium. The coatings could be far cheaper than today's solar panels and could be applied to both vertical and horizontal surfaces.
⁸

All of those possibilities are exciting, and they should find a ready market. While I believe that natural gas and nuclear power offer the best short- and long-term energy options for the future, I'm also bullish on
solar. That said, I'm leery of making sweeping pronouncements. My wariness is, in part, a product of seeing how the shale gas revolution has swept away much of the conventional wisdom about the future of the U.S. gas industry. In the span of about three years, from 2005 to 2008, the industry swung from fears of gas shortages to a glut of gas. Looking back even further provides evidence of another disruptive technology. In 1882, Thomas Edison built the first central power station on Pearl Street in New York City, and within eight years, there were 1,000 similar stations operating all across the country.

Similar technological disruptions may lie ahead. They could include a breakthrough in energy storage technology or perhaps the discovery of a massive new oil field. A drop in oil demand combined with excess oil production capacity would result in a major drop in the price of oil—and that price decrease would immediately undermine the push for alternative energy efforts. I've made clear my position that hydrocarbons will persist for many decades to come, and yet I know that I could be proven wrong. As Voltaire said, “certainty is absurd.”

At the end of my last book
Gusher of Lies
, I offered a few suggestions about energy policy. As I look at some of those suggestions today, roughly two years later, I find that my positions haven't changed.
^a
But given those suggestions, I need to outline the gist of the N2N Plan.

When he announced the Pickens Plan, Dallas oil baron T. Boone Pickens said that “an idiot with a plan is better than a genius with no plan.” Unlike Pickens, I don't have $60 million to launch a media drive to promote N2N, but perhaps that's okay, because my plan isn't as complicated as his. In fact, the N2N Plan has just four concepts:

That's it. The N2N Plan doesn't make any promises about reductions in foreign oil, or carbon dioxide emissions, or anything else. Further note that the last two items don't even really need to be stated. The United States, and the other countries of the world, will keep pursuing efficiency, renewables, and energy storage because those areas have always attracted capital. We don't need to tell entrepreneurs and engineers to make more efficient machines. They do it on their own because they are interested in making money. Huge amounts of capital—including billions of dollars courtesy of U.S. taxpayers—are going into the energy storage business because batteries, hybrid cars, and electric cars all have some potential for displacing some hydrocarbons.

Although the United States should be encouraging more production of oil—and of natural gas—within the United States and in its offshore waters, the Obama administration and leading congressional Democrats have threatened to repeal a pair of tax breaks that oil and gas industry officials believe are essential. Obama's 2010 budget called for the elimination of the expensing of “intangible drilling costs,” which allows energy companies to deduct the bulk of their expenses for drilling new wells; it also called for ending “percentage depletion,” which allows well owners to deduct a certain amount of the value of their production in a given year. In May 2009, Obama called the tax treatments “unjustifiable loopholes” that do “little to incentivize production or reduce energy prices.”
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But getting rid of those tax breaks now, just months after the U.S. natural gas sector has unlocked enormous quantities of shale gas, makes no sense whatsoever. Fortunately, common sense appears to have triumphed and the tax breaks remain in place—at least for the time being.

Given that it's in America's long-term interest to promote nuclear power at home, it must also take a leadership role globally on the issues of nuclear safety, regulation, and proliferation. Therefore, my first suggestion, and perhaps the most important one, is for the United States to support the one organization that is already set up to do that on the international level.

The damage done by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their cronies to the reputation of the United States in the international arena will last for decades. Bush and Cheney tarnished America's image on a variety of issues, including the use of torture against prisoners and adherence to human rights principles and the rule of law. But when it comes to energy issues, few things have hurt America's long-term credibility more than the Bush administration's steamrolling of the International Atomic Energy Agency in its headlong rush to unleash the dogs of war on Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, top Bush administration officials repeatedly claimed that Iraq was trying to build a nuclear weapon. On September 7, 2002, Bush himself falsely claimed that the IAEA, the lead global agency in dealing with proliferation issues, had issued a report saying that Iraq was just six months away from developing a nuclear weapon.
¹⁰
A few months later, on January 27, 2003, the director general of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, told the United Nations Security Council that there was no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq and that the aluminum tubes that were a focal point of the U.S. disinformation program “would not be suitable for manufacturing centrifuges” needed to enrich uranium.
¹¹

ElBaradei, of course, was right. After the invasion, the U.S. military never found any nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But that didn't stop the Bush administration from belittling the agency and ElBaradei. In 2005, John Bolton, whom Bush had nominated to be America's ambassador to the UN, said that the IAEA's declaration that Iraq didn't have a nuclear weapons program was “simply impossible to believe.” That same year, the Bush administration tried to have ElBaradei replaced.
¹²

In 2005, ElBaradei was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,
¹³
and in 2009 he told
Time
magazine that the “most dissatisfying moment of my life, of course, was when the Iraq war was launched. That hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives on the basis of fiction, not facts, makes me shudder.”
¹⁴
Although ElBaradei left the IAEA in late 2009, the Vienna-based agency remains the essential international agency for nuclear issues and is focused solely on those issues. ElBaradei played a critical
role in the international negotiations aimed at heading off a military confrontation with Iran over its nuclear aspirations, and his replacement will have to take a similar high-profile role.
¹⁵

For the United States to embrace N2N, it must be committed to vigorous international regulation and policing of the nuclear sector. That means closer monitoring of the fuel being used by the growing number of nuclear reactors as well as increased efforts at ports and other locations to detect any radioactive materials that could be used for nefarious purposes.

Created in 1957, the IAEA was set up as a global “atoms for peace” agency under the aegis of the UN.
¹⁶
It now operates on a budget of about $400 million per year.
¹⁷
But it needs more money, political support, and technology. The United States should help to provide all three.

President Obama has indicated that he wants more international nuclear cooperation. In his April 2009 speech in Prague, he said that he wanted to “build a new framework for civil nuclear cooperation, including an international fuel bank, so that countries can access peaceful power without increasing the risks of proliferation.”
¹⁸
That's an easy speech to make. But making that kind of program into a reality requires having a strong, credible, forceful IAEA—and no country is more important in making the IAEA credible than the United States. That is nothing new. Supporting the IAEA has been in America's long-term interests since the end of World War II.

In 1946, U.S. Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson (who became secretary of state in 1949) asked David Lilienthal, the head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, to chair a panel to advise President Harry Truman about nuclear weapons.
¹⁹
That same year, Lilienthal headed the production of a document known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, which concluded that the world had entered a new era in which nuclear technology would be widely known and understood. It said flatly that “there will no longer be secrets about atomic energy,” and it declared that, given the potential destructiveness of nuclear weapons, there must be “international control of atomic energy” coupled with “a system of inspection.”
²⁰

Today, more than six decades after that document was written, the need for international control of nuclear materials, along with reliable systems of inspection of nuclear facilities, remains essential. In fact, the need for a
strong IAEA has never been more obvious. The United States must—repeat, must—be a leader in giving the IAEA all of the authority it needs to finally make the objectives of the Acheson-Lilienthal Report into a reality.