Population and economic growth are based upon increased energy consumption, and the modern banking system and money supply depend upon unsustainable perpetual growth to function. This system was bound to hit “the limits to growth” eventually, which occurred in 2008. The U.S. and other advanced economies are now in the worst depression/recession ever, one which may never end for decades. U.S. oil consumption is down to 19 million barrels a day, from a high of 21 million barrels a day in early 2007, and could be a fraction of its current rate in the near term. We are in for a gargantuan and perhaps exciting challenge, and must carefully examine the various alternatives to declining petroleum. Most purported “ways out” are false hopes, either because they are too small to matter or have a fatal flaw.
Hydroelectric power is low-cost, but can’t be expanded. Plus, it isn’t really renewable anyway, in a hundred years our dams will be solid rock due to silt.
Geothermal also can’t be expanded. There are some very efficient geyser facilities in northern Cal., but expanding geothermal in the region was recently abandoned due to cost and that it was creating earthquakes. If you dig seven miles below ground to expand geothermal, it interferes with net energy, and the water temperature is far too low for efficient power generation under the second law.
Biomass as currently practiced—corn ethanol or soybean diesel—produces such small gains in net energy that no amount of farmland could contribute significantly to reducing fossil fuel consumption. Corn ethanol has a negative EROEI, whereas soybean diesel can be produced at a tiny energy profit. However, even if we converted all 75 million acres of soybeans into biodiesel, with a net yield of 35 gallons per acre, this would be 2.5 billion gallons, or less than one percent of U.S. petroleum consumption, even before EROEI is factored in. And to think that in 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry said that we could achieve “energy independence” by getting 20 percent of our fuel from soybeans by 2020. 2020, 20 percent in 2020, that’s just something easy to remember that has no basis in the physical world. As for cellulosic alcohol, cellulose is very difficult to break down, and the lignin advocates plan to use for process heat is less than 20 percent of the mass of fast growing plants. Most next-gen biofuel companies have already gone bankrupt.
Wind is geographically limited to at most a terawatt worldwide, whereas solar has huge potential capacity. Unfortunately, the fatal flaw is that even in the windiest spots, the wind only blows at the right speed one-third of the time, and the sun delivers only 2,000 effective hours of daylight per year (20 percent), even in the desert. We unfortunately have no way to store electricity on a large scale today—even advanced lithium ion batteries have only one-eightieth the energy density of gasoline. A single six-pound gallon of gas contains as much stored energy as one ton of lead-acid batteries. In 2006, Germany had 80 percent of all the solar panels in the world, producing a half a percent of their electricity, at a cost of 50 cents a kilowatt-hour. Hydro is 1.5 cents, nuclear 1.72, and coal 2.75 cents a kilowatt-hour. Wind is around half solar’s cost—still much too expensive—and requires prohibitive amounts of steel, concrete, and metals.
Efficiency has always coincided with increased, rather than decreased, fossil fuel consumption, and doesn’t even keep up with growth in demand, a trend called Jevons Paradox. The world currently uses 15 terawatts, and if we don’t produce at least 20-25 terawatts by 2050, the world won’t be a very happy place, even taking into account gradual efficiency gains. As for hydrogen, some see it as being capable of a seem-less transition. Unfortunately, hydrogen isn’t even a primary source of energy, it is just a way of storing and transporting energy—both of which it does incredibly poorly.
Nuclear fusion releases its energy as damaging neutrons. In a commercial deuterium tritium fusion plant we would have to tear apart the inside of the reactor every few months due to neutron damage, then build it back up again—there’s no possible way to do this at an acceptable cost.
And finally, while coal and gas were good alternatives to petroleum in the past, they too are showing their limits like never before. The U.S. peaked in producible energy from coal (not tonnage) in 1998, and nat. gas in 1973. The world is at peak coal now, and conventional gas is about to go off a cliff. “Shale gas” is a chimera with a very low flow rate and EROEI like tar sands.
Given the extreme limits of most ways out, all we are left with is conservation and nuclear. Given the importance of energy in ensuring the well being of a population, nuclear power should have belonged to the Democrats. Instead, because we are not a sane or rational society, it was relegated to the extreme right-wing fringes of the Republican Party. By 2000, the U.S. nuclear power industry had all but disappeared. People who actually understand energy are now laughing at liberals.
Of the 400 or so nuclear plants in operation around the world, nearly all are light water reactors, which face an imminent uranium shortage. They have given France, Sweden, and several other nations energy independence at low cost, and the cleanest air in the industrialized world. Still, Megatons to Megawatts ending in two years will be the end of light water reactors.
Cutting demand (conservation) won’t be popular, but we could take at least one significant step—by curbing population growth. The path we’re on will add 150 million new residents to the U.S. population by 2050 on top of the 313 million we already have. But this growth is driven almost entirely by immigration levels set by Congress, which Congress has the power to reduce. They just haven’t made the connection yet between population and energy.
Given this situation, we came very close to a Malthusian die-off. But we are lucky, and one way out exists: fast reactors. Light water reactors use less than one percent of the energy in uranium, whereas fast reactors use all of it. As a result, they can deliver an unlimited fuel supply (at least at current energy use rates), and solve the key issues of waste, cost, safety, and proliferation. Fast reactors convert the 99.3 percent of uranium atoms which will not normally split into plutonium atoms which will, and produce more plutonium than they consume (hence the name, fast breeder reactor).
Proliferation-resistant metallurgical fuel cycles mix actinides in with the plutonium, so that it is not weaponizable, nearly impossible to purify, and dangerous to handle. A new metal-alloy fuel form makes fast reactors passively safe. And, waste would be reduced to one ton of fission products per gigawatt-year, compared to 10 million tons of CO2 if an equivalent amount of energy was supplied by coal.
That’s 10 million times the energy density! Further, fission products are no more radioactive than uranium ore in the ground after 200 years. Fast reactors could be fueled for centuries using our existing spent fuel and depleted uranium stockpiles, eliminating the need for mining. If you get all your energy over your entire lifetime from fast reactors, the amount of uranium used would be the size of a half a ping-pong ball. And, the cost would likely be as low as hydro or light water reactors, less than a couple of pennies a kilowatt-hour.
Not that all of this will be simple. A single sentence in President Clinton’s 1994 state of the union address was chilling: “We will terminate unnecessary programs in advanced reactor development.” Anti-nuclear Clinton just stepped into office and canceled the technology in 1994. Now, it will be more than a decade until we build a prototype fast reactor, do necessary engineering, then begin building them by the dozen. It will take decades to build the thousand reactors we will eventually need, plus reorganizing civilization to run on electricity and synthetic energy carriers like ammonia. None-the-less, we can’t afford to pretend that this crisis won’t continue to get much worse, and we can’t afford to keep wasting time and resources on false hopes. Like what you see? Hit "subscribe."
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