The Energy Wars

I just finished reading a book, Energy and Climate Wars by Glover and Economides, that is timely given the problems in Japan and the media's focus on the nuclear "meltdown". I started the book both because it had just come out but in my executive MBA class several students had scoffed when I noted that nuclear uses less water than solar and that fracking would prove to be the U.S.'s way to gain energy independence. A student told me that his child had just been shown a movie, much like Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" that prosletizes against anything other than solar or wind. The video focused on fracking, the process of drilling 10,000 feet below the surface and then several hundred feet sideways to reach shale rock. The rock is then bombarded with high pressure water and chemicals that fracture the rock. This enables the oil and natural gas there to be pumped to the surface. The proces is relatively inexpensive given new technologies and uses about the same amount of water as current large scale solar farms. The environmentalist groups have attacked fracking as environmentally dangerous, creating monsters out of animals and damaging drinking water. The student was shown a faucet where the water coming out of it could be lit on fire. Of course, the video did not mention that there are such water sources today where no fracking occurs. It did not mention that it is impossible for the fracking chemicals to seep up 10,000 feet to reach water aquifiers. It simply scared the kids.

The media's response to Japan's nuclear problem is meant simply to scare people. And it is effective. Look at the number of people in California purchasing iodide pills. But, according to nuclear physicists I have read and listened to, the meltdown is not a problem to health. It merely means the utility that owns the nuclear plant will take a big hit. The nuclear plant is ruined. Very little radiation is supposed to leak out even in a meltdown and that that does leak is due to the venting of hydrogen to reduce pressure inside the dome and enable cooling water to be injected.

The cost per kilowatt hour of power generated by various power sources implies that nuclear would be less costly than virtually anything other than hydro power. Moreover, nuclear could generate the huge quantities of power necessary, something that wind farms and solar farms can not do.