If nuclear power is so hazardous, why doesn’t the government decommission its scores of naval reactors? If the naval reactors are safe, why aren’t we building them for commercial power production?
It is the responsibility of senior political leadership, not private industry or private capital to shape public perception and chart an environmentally sound energy policy. Many private companies had developed and promoted much safer reactor designs, but found government hostile to any rational system of licensing, testing, and implementation. Government even strangled Silex, which promised to cut fuel costs for new design fission reactor by a factor of 3-6. That happened under Chu’s watch. I never heard that he resigned in protest or launched any public relations campaigns for numerically compelling alternatives to burning carbon fuels.
]]>But the telling economic fact is the value of the oil pays for the CO2 sequestration. The oil that is produced will be burned as transportation fuel to produce new atmospheric CO2 within 6-months. Before the sequestration boondoggle scheme attempts to capture the power plant CO2, the carbon is already sequestered in the form of underground coal and natural gas.
The burned transportation fuel CO2 will not be sequestered. The number of suitable oil fields for receiving the power plant CO2 are trivial compared to the amount of CO2 produced at power plants. The major CO2 problem is in China and India. There, they are burning mega tons of coal daily to produce most of the electricity, and the more electricity they produce the more productive their economies become, so more coal will be burned to meet the electrical demand produced by the growing economies, which will then hugely increase demand for vehicles and transportation fuels. The underground tertiary recovery oil field sequestration scheme is a boondoggle that will increase, not reduce atmospheric CO2. But North Americans will have to pay more for electricity, which will reduce productivity and more jobs will be lost. It’s worse than Oswald Spengler ever imagined.
Nuke plants don’t emit much CO2. While Stephen Chu was US Energy Secretary, not a single new smaller safer cheaper nuke plant design was licensed for commercial application. How many new prototype fission reactor designs are running and undergoing testing at Idaho National Labs? Sequestration is a frank admission by government that we will continue to get our power and transportation energy by burning carbon based fuels. Hence global CO2 levels will continue to rise at ever increasing rates.
]]>Dr. Chu is being paid to lend his famous name to a problematic enterprise. The promoters expect that Chu’s government contacts and influemce will lead to swill hog government mandates and subsidies. The company’s web site talks about how wonderful the technology is, but they can’t tell us exactly how it works or provide us with actual numerical analysis. It’s over-hyped without any real technical substance. They need Chu because they can’t make a compelling technical demonstration of the secret “proprietary process.” If they could actually make the demonstration, they wouldn’t need to puff up the board with Chu. Don’t bet much on this one. The numbers will never add up to anything that could actually make a significant dent in the carbon buildup problem. But government intervention in North America requiring carbon sequesteration might produce significant energy cost increases, loss of jobs, profits for Inventys, and economic ascendancy of China and India.
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