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Chapter 23.
Divided We Fail
Have The United Nations Fix The Supersize Power Plants

Establish a United Nations Corps of Engineers.
Whaat!? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Corps_of_Engineers
Have them fix the world's supersize power plants independent of and at no expense to local governments. This is the answer to China's and India's reluctance.
To pay for this program, everyone in the world who used fossil fuel electricity would pay a 1/2¢ per kiloWatt-hour (kWh) tax to the United Nations.

Part 1 Have the United Nations Fix the Supersized Power Plants.
Part 2 First World Nations.
Part 3 Second World Nations.
Part 4 Third World Nations.
Further Information

Introduction.

Part 1: United Nations Remediation. Have the United Nations Fix the Supersized Power Plants.

Have the United Nations Fix the Supersized Power Plants.

World Electricity Production: 18.58 Trillion kiloWatt-Hours (2005 Est.) according to the CIA fact book. So, at 1/2¢ per kWh, 18.6 * .5 = 9.3 * 10¹² = $93 billion, first year. 1/2 billion each should cover 200 mass-produced nuclear boilers per year. Remember, we're just replacing the boiler, no other major machinery. Installing 200 nuclear boilers a year should keep a small army of contractors busy since the power plants will probably be 8 unit plants and only one unit can be out of service at a time. This means there could be contractors on site for as many as 8 years.

This would raise $93 billion. So, for the first year, at $1.00 per watt (Hyperion's asking price for one of its 25 MWe reactors), 93 billion watts could be converted from coal to nuclear. 93 * 10⁹ watts * 8.760 * 10³ hours per year = 814.680 * 10¹² watt-hours per year or 815 * 10⁹ kiloWatt-hours (815 billion kiloWatt-hours).

How much CO2 will $93 billion end? Each kiloWatt hour of coal electricity causes about 2 pounds of CO2 according to the US DOE ( CO2 emissons from various fuels.pdf - Table 4 ) so we have 2 * 815 or 1,630 * 10⁹pounds divided by 2 * 10³ pounds per ton or 0.815 * 10⁹tons or 0.815 billion tons of CO2 emissions ended in one year for $93 billion. Remember, there are only about 11 billion tons making ALL of coal's Global Warming CO2. At this rate, it would take 13.5 years to COMPLETELY end coal's CO2 emissions.

The operators of the nuclear repowered power plants would then have to purchase nuclear fuels instead of coal.

According to CARMA, the biggest 1,200 power plants in the world make 75% of all coal CO2. The money would disappear as the CO2 disappeared.

What the world is doing to end Global Warming isn't working. It will never work. By casting too broad a net, it has created too many culprits and too much counterproductive chaos. Carbon limits for whole countries borders on the idiotic when most of the fixable carbon sources are easily identified stationary machines. Everyone is trying to fix every imaginable source of CO2 simultaneously. "Cap and Trade" and "Carbon Taxes" punish far too many relatively innocent bystanders, making it very easy to marshal strong political opposition. The entire world needs to halt everything Global Warming and "Stand Down" on the Global Warming issue for several months to gather its thoughts.

The author is suggesting a different approach to ending Global Warming: Fix the biggest sources of CO2 first. Once a site's fix technology is proven, the "Fix" for a specific reactor/turbine combination could then be established as a standard and mass-produced for the other examples, regardless of where in the world they are. Don't sweat the small sources of CO2 until only small sources of CO2 remain.

Mankind's survival depends upon electricity. The objective is upgrading a power plant to CO2-free, not to not to put it out of business.

At this stage of the game any cost figure is highly speculative. Here are some prices that fall in line with current street prices for electricity generation plants. Nuclear repowering would have to come in at about $1.00 a watt to be competitive with a $3.00 a watt modular. All the plants worth cleaning up are over 1,000 megaWatts in size so would have $1 billion or more available for repowering. Repowering provides a huge cost and time savings compared to building completely new, should cost about the same as Clean Coal's "Carbon Capture" CO2 system. Repowering's whole reason for being is economics and simplicity.

As of July, 2008, carbon uncertainties have driven new coal-burning power plant costs to $3.50 per watt to construct (Synapse Energy Economics, Inc.). Florida's new Crystal River nuclear plant has estimates of $7.00 or more a watt. Mass production always brings about dramatic reductions in unit costs along with substantial increases in product quality and uniformity. Producing the large Russian BN-800 reactor as we did Liberty ships during World War II - at the rate of one every two days - and in several sizes - 200, 400, and 800 MWe seems to be a good idea at the moment. The BN-800 is a lot smaller and simpler than even a small ocean-going tug boat. The world builds 5,000 ocean-going vessels each year, we would need perhaps 3,000 BN-200s, 400s and 800s over 15 years.

Until we get to perhaps the tenth repowering project, any contractor worth his salt is going to fold substantial amounts of "Fear Money" into his quotes to cover his tail in the event unforeseen contingencies rear their ugly heads. And they usually come in swarms.

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A Strategy to End Global Warming Quickly

New modular nuclear reactors open a new path to ending Global Warming

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"Get the 1,200 worst power plants first."
(There are 60,000 power plants of all sizes in the world.)

These are the folks who are the 'keepers' of Global Warming:

United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

http://www.ipcc.ch/ General IPCC public home page
http://www.ipcc-wg3.de/organisation/ipcc How the IPCC is organized

The IPCC has announced they will release their 5th Climate Change assessment in 2014. Why such a long wait?

The IPCC has three working groups

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/index.html Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change
http://www.ipcc-wg2.org/index.html Working Group II: Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
http://www.ipcc-wg3.de/ Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change and Task Force on Greenhouse Inventories
http://www.ipcc-wg3.de/organisation/technical-support-unit/staff/tsu-staff Working Group III support staff

An excellent piece of strategic thinking has come out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group III:
"Get the 5,000 worst coal burning power plants first."

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Global Warming in General

All you really have to know to end Global Warming:

Its very simple: Electricity power plants and building heating plants produce most of the world's Global Warming CO2.
They can be repowered with nuclear heat.

Converting just the 12 largest coal burning power plants in the world to nuclear would end more CO2 than all the world's windmills built to date. (Data)
And, there are 60,000 power plants in the world.

We are wasting our time and attention on Global Warming issues that don't really matter - like light bulbs and windmills - or things we don't need to change yet - like cars. Electricity and building heating are Job #1.

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First, Second, and Third world nation
Global Warming mitigation policies.

Again, the operative paradigm is that nuclear's bad rap from the fossil fuel industry's propaganda machine does not exist.

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Part 2: United Nations Remediation. First World Nations.

First World Nations:
Large Power Plants and Natural Gas Heating
Are All That Need to Be Fixed or Replaced

Someone at Working Group III made the statement: "Get the 5,000 worst coal burning power plants first."

The statement should be expanded to: "Get the the 5,000 worst coal, 5,000 worst natural gas, and 5,000 worst oil burning power plants first. Power plants are easy-to-find sitting duck targets. Power plants make more CO2 and other atmospheric pollutants than any other industrial activity on Planet Earth.

These plants are scattered all over the world, and there are always power plant contractors nearby. They could all be put to work repowering hundreds of power plants to small nuclear simultaneously.

There are also about 1,500 large desalination facilities, all oil burners, in the world. They are also easy-to-find, easy-to-fix sitting ducks. Almost any reactor will produce enough heat to power almost any flash desalination installation. Most are mid-east. Saudi Arabia gets 70% of it's drinking water from desalination.

Notice those two huge smokestacks?

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Part 3: United Nations Remediation. Second World Nations.

Second World Nations Can Be 'Nuclear Neutral' Nations
A foreign aid program to encourage untrustworthy second world countries to end their CO2 pollution
(From "Making It Happen", further developed here.)

I see Global Warming as the moment of truth for Mankind and his technology-based life-supporting economies. Mankind is facing a test of passage. It has become inescapable that we must reconcile our life support systems with nature's life support systems.

Cap 'n Trade, Carbon Taxes, etc., are ways of pretending we don't really have to do the right thing. Kind of reminds me of Neville Chamberlain's "Peace In Our Time."
I don't think the World War Two analogy is overly dramatic.

The fossil fuels we are burning make up over 80% of the Global Warming problem. Only nuclear has the power to replace and surpass fossil fuels. Global Warming is a real, physical, non-negotiable, thing that will only succumb to a very expensive and protracted all-out nuclear attack.

The test for Mankind will be whether or not Man can learn to end Global Warming by living amongst copious amounts of nuclear materials in the hands of everyone of every culture or will Man choose to, as he has done over and over with fossil energy, use the energy to destroy.

First world nations spend billions in foreign aid every year. Energy is the master resource, a most beneficial form of aid. Compare energy-affluent South Korea with energy-impoverished North Korea.

Perhaps Mankind has grown enough to return to a form of Eisenhower's original "Atoms For Peace" program where we could bribe untrustworthy nations to be carbon-neutral by their being "Nuclear-Neutral." They would accept, use, and then return nuclear electricity barges for recycling in exchange for their not burning fossil fuels. If they felt they were not getting all the electricity they needed, they could simply resume burning fossil fuels.

The Russian "reactor on a barge" seems like a good place to start. They seal the reactor, tow it to a port city (and a country's most important city is usually a port), then let it run for 5 to 30 years depending on reactor type. When the fuel is "tired," a new barge takes its place and the old barge is towed back to Russia where the fuel is removed and recycled. Reloaded, refurbished, and resealed, the barge is then towed to some other user. I'm sure the first world would be glad to chip in to pay the Russians to build a fleet of such reactor barges. The Russians could build every 10th one for free as their contribution.

This is very similar to what Toshiba is going to do for the Alaskan city of Galena, except in Galena's case, the small reactor will be off loaded from a transport barge towed up the Yukon River and placed in a 100 foot deep underground silo that will be sealed. That reactor, currently a Toshiba 10 MWe 4S fast-neutron unit, will run for 30 years at full power before having to be returned to Japan for recycling.

The largest reactor being proposed for a Russian reactor barge is the VBER-300, a proposed compact conventional Russian pressurized water reactor of 300-MWe or more generating capacity designed for remote locations. There would be two such reactors on the 49,000 ton Russian floating nuclear power station. The VBER-300 would use VVER-type fuel. The reactor has been proposed for use in water desalination as well as for electrical generation.

Russian floating nuclear dual 70-megawatt electrical power station:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station
Russia to build floating Arctic nuclear stations.pdf
Russia will build floating nuclear power plants.pdf

Claimed to be big enough to power a city of 200,000 and a heat source for a 64 million gallon per day sea water desalination facility.

Reactor on a sea-going barge. Russian commercial product.

Combination nuclear power generation and desalination units. The really neat thing about a reactor-on-a-raft is how easy it is to find cooling water.

The neat thing about shipyards is that, given a standardized product to make out of standardized parts, they crank out ships very rapidly. The world produces about 5,000 more-or-less standardized new ocean going ships every year. Ships have about a 30 year life, the newest reactors can go 30 years between refuelings.

Second world nations often have mines, smelters, or other isolated industrial operations that do produce large amounts of CO2 and air pollutants.

Five floating reactors could go to Gazprom to power oil and gas extraction in Kola and Yamal, with four more used in northern Yakutia in connection with mining operations. Seven or eight units could be produced by 2015.

Russians Announce that Floating Nuclear Plant Will be Ready to Go in 2012. By James Kantor, NYTimes, July 9, 2009. The United Industrial Corporation, a Russian manufacturer, said this week that the world's first floating nuclear power plant will go into operation on Russia's eastern coast by the end of 2012... The manufacturer, known also as O.P.K., [said] that the first model would be used to help power Viluchinsk, a city on the Kamchatka peninsula that serves as an atomic submarine base. O.P.K. said similar models could power other cities in northern Russia in the future. But according to nuclear experts, mining companies are likely to use Russian-built floating reactors to power operations to extract oil and gas and valuable minerals from the Arctic and other remote regions... The advantages of floating nuclear plants include maneuverability of the machines so that they can be serviced, as well as the ability to be towed near remote settlements or sites of energy-intensive industries -- like water desalination -- where need is greatest for electricity. Other potential benefits include the offshore locale, away from population areas where residents might otherwise object to the presence of nuclear power. But putting reactors at sea is likely to raise concerns about the safety in extreme weather conditions, vulnerability to terrorism, and disposal of the radioactive waste they produce."

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Part 4: United Nations Remediation. Third World Nations.

Third world nations are naturally 'Carbon Neutral'
But Some Could Benefit Greatly From the Second World Plan

About 2 billion of the world's 6+ billion population are 'Carbon Neutral,' living unheated in temperate to tropical regions and burning mostly biofuels like firewood and buffalo chips when they need (mostly) cooking heat. As a consequence, they are not to blame for any portion of Global Warming and have every right to be as critical as they wish about the first world, and to a lesser extent, second world bringing about Global Warming.

Third world nations often have mines, smelters, or other isolated industrial operations that do produce large amounts of CO2 and air pollutants.

This page is a demonstration of how ending Global Warming and Energy Independence can make each other happen.

(Reactor shown here in a Hyperion Co. sales drawing powering water desalination/purification equipment in a low-tech environment.

Doesn't this tell you something about how dangerous these reactors really are?)

The new reactors: The new Hyperion NuScale and mPower brand mini reactors are developed and waiting for certification by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Ways are being found to make potentially lethal household appliances safer to use all the time.
Why listen to those who say this can't be done for nuclear appliances?

Further Information.

Footnotes

Reactors ready for floating plant

07 August 2009

Russia's Afrikantov OKBM has completed the assembly of the second KLT-40S reactor for the country's first floating nuclear power plant, currently under construction in St Petersburg. The first reactor has already been delivered.

How the completed floating plant could look (Image: Energoatom

The assembly and acceptance testing of the reactor was conducted at the Nizhniy Novgorod AtomEnergoProekt (NN-AEP). OKBM Afrikantov designed and provided technical support for the manufacture of the reactor, while Izhorskiye Zavody produced the reactor vessel and NN-AEP manufactured parts for the reactor and assembled it.

An acceptance committee has confirmed that reactor is to the required standard. The committee comprised representatives from NN-AEP, Afrikantov OKBM, from Energoatom's Directorate for the Construction of Floating Nuclear Power Plants, the Russian Maritime Register of Shipping and the Federal Service for Ecological, Technological and Nuclear Supervision (Rostekhnadzor).

Assembly of the first reactor for the floating plant was completed earlier this year and the reactor vessel for the unit was shipped to the Baltiysky Zavod shipbuilding company in St Petersburg on 31 May for fitment to the completed keel of the first floating plant, the Akademik Lomonosov. The pressure vessel for the second reactor was shipped on 5 August The reactor internals are scheduled to be shipped to the company in mid-August.

The Akademik Lomonosov will house two 35 MW KLT-40S nuclear reactors, similar to those used in Russia's nuclear powered ice breakers, and its generators will be capable of supplying a city of 200,000 people, officials said. OKBM has designed and supplied the reactors, while Kaluga Turbine Plant will supply the turbo-generators. The power vessel was originally destined for the Archangelsk industrial shipyard, which is near to Severodvinsk in northwestern Russia, but will now be deployed at Vilyuchinsk, in the Kamchatka region in Russia's far east.

Baltiysky Zavod is to complete the floating plant in 2011. It should then be ready for transportation by the second quarter of 2012 and is set to be handed over to Energoatom by the end of 2012. Rosatom is planning to construct seven further floating nuclear power plants in addition to the one now under construction, with several remote areas under consideration for their deployment. Gazprom is expected to use a number of the floating units in order to exploit oil and gas fields near the Kola and Yamal Peninsulars.

From Chapter 6

Chapter 6.
Financial Issues
(The nominal power plant for this page will be a 500 MWe unit.)

Part 1 Option 1: Have the United Nations Fix the World's Supersized Power Plants.
Part 2 Option 2: Pay for it with Carbon Credits.
Part 3 Option 3: Have a State Company like Russia's Rosatom convert to nuclear in exchange for fuel contracts.
Part 4 Option 4: Take it out of the "Maintenance Kitty."
Further Information

Introduction.

Mankind's survival depends upon electricity. The objective is upgrading a power plant to CO2-free, not to not to put it out of business.

At coal's 2 lb of CO2 per kilowatt-hour (EIA), a 500 MWe reactor will avoid making 12,000 tons of CO2 every 24 hours or almost 4.4 million tons of CO2 every year.

At this stage of the game any cost figure is highly speculative. Here are some prices that fall in line with current street prices for electricity generation plants. Nuclear repowering would have to come in at about $1.00 a watt to be competitive with a $3.00 a watt modular nuclear power plant such as a NuScale or Babcock & Wilcox mPower. All the plants worth cleaning up are over 1,000 megaWatts in size so would have $1 billion or more available for repowering. Repowering provides a huge cost and time savings compared to building completely new, should cost about the same as Clean Coal's "Carbon Capture" CO2 system. Repowering's whole reason for being is economics and simplicity.

Mass production always brings about dramatic reductions in unit costs along with substantial increases in product quality and uniformity. Producing the large Russian BN-800 reactor as we did Liberty ships during World War II - at the rate of one every two days - and in several sizes - 200, 400, and 800 MWe seems to be a good idea at the moment. The BN-800 is a lot smaller and simpler than even a small ocean-going tug boat. The world builds 5,000 ocean-going vessels each year, we would need perhaps 3,000 BN-200s, 400s and 800s over 15 years.

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Part 1: Financial Options. Option 1: Have the United Nations Fix the Supersize Power Plants.

Option 1: Have The United Nations Fix
The World's Supersized Power Plants

To pay for this program, everyone in the world who used fossil fuel electricity would pay
a 1/2¢ per kiloWatt-hour (kWh) tax to the United Nations.

The operators of the nuclear repowered power plants would then have to purchase nuclear fuels instead of coal.

According to CARMA, the biggest 1,200 power plants in the world make 75% of all coal CO2. The money would disappear as the CO2 disappeared.

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Part 2: Financial Options. Option 2: Pay for it with Carbon Credits.

Option 2: Pay for it with Carbon Credits

This one is better suited to regular-sized boilers.

Jim: Stumbled on your web site and want to congratulate you on your mission. I have been working on a similar unsolicited proposal to convert one of our largest coal plants in --XX-- to nuclear. The interest in the large plants is that one saves the incredible investment in siting, cooling towers, electric generators, some of the lower pressure stages of the turbines( as you are aware the nuclear plants have lower steam pressures and temperatures but multistage turbines can be converted to salvage some of their cost), the condensing equipment, the switching yard, and most importantly the transmission lines and towers. A very rough estimate is that half the cost of a new nuclear plant of the same size could be salvaged.

The federal government could loan the money and the utility smart enough to make this change could return the loan in carbon credits. Large nuclear plants are very labor intensive and we obviously need the jobs.

Keep pounding your drum. Solar and wind won’t hack it. --X X--

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Part 3: Financial Options. Option 3: Have a State Company like Russia's Rosatom convert to nuclear in exchange for fuel contracts.

Option 3: Have a State Company like Russia's Rosatom provide,
install, and fuel the repowering reactor in exchange for the previous 20 years of the boiler's equivalent delivered coal payments paid over 20 years.

There's a hell of a zinger in this one. A fast-neutron reactor's closed fuel cycle potential. Rosatom is saying they think they may be able to make their fast-neutron reactor, the BN-800, run 20 years on a single load of fuel.

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Part 4: Financial Options. Option 4: Take it out of the "Maintenance Kitty."

Option 4: Take it out of the "Maintenance Kitty"

Just to stay in operation, the power companies must constantly invest about $3.00 per kW-year just to keep their total capacity available as it ages. Huge sum of money over 75 years.

A typical boiler burns out after about 20 years of hard use. Reactor steam generators might never wear out although cracking from vibration or sub-optimal water treatment might be hazards.

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Further Information.

(From: http://www.nucleartourist.com/basics/costs.htm )

Illustrative cost comparison. The table below compares nuclear versus coal specific item costs for similar age and size plants on a $ per Megawatt-hour (10 $/Mw-hr = 1 cent/kw-hr):

Item	Cost Element	Nuclear	Coal
		$/Mw-hr	$/Mw-hr
1	Fuel	5.0	11.0
2	Operating & Maintenance - Labor & Materials	6.0	5.0
3	Pensions, Insurance, Taxes	1.0	1.0
4	Regulatory Fees	1.0	0.1
5	Property Taxes	2.0	2.0
6	Capital	9.0	9.0
7	Decommissioning & DOE waste costs	5.0	0.0
8	Administrative / overheads	1.0	1.0
Total		30.0	29.1

A number of factors can affect the annual costs during any given year.

For a 500 MWe coal plant and a 75% capacity factor annual run:

8760 hours * 0.75 = 6570 hours * 500 MWe = 3,285,000 MW-h * $5 per MW-h = $16 million per year = Chickenfeed.

How about 20 years of coal?

3,285,000 mw-h * $11 per MW-h = $36 million per year * 20 years = $723 million. Maybe. For a naked nuke tub and steam generator.

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Carbon "Sin Tax" money will hook government, prolong Global Warming.

Sin Tax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_tax Ecotax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_tax_shift Pigovian Tax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

Have we learned absolutely nothing from our tobacco tax experience? Or have governments learned too much?

New York Times, April 13, 1998

Essay; The Syntax of Sin Tax

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Even more addictive than nicotine is money. The anti-smoking lobby has found a way to hook the Federal Government on tobacco money.

If its latest scheme to snatch a half-trillion dollars in new cigarette taxes becomes law, Uncle Sam -- raking in a huge national sales tax -- will have a vested interest in the continuation of smoking.

Look ahead. One day there will be a recession and the budget will plunge into deficit. Popular handouts like free milk for children in prison will be dependent on the tax revenue from tobacco sales, just as education will depend on tax receipts from gambling casinos.

Result: further political dependency on ''sin taxes,'' the government's cut of profit on booze, crapshooting and smoking. What politician is now likely to cut out programs supported by tobacco billions, or raise taxes the painful way to balance a budget? No; if you depend on sin, you are inclined to protect it.

A sin tax is a tax that falls heaviest on the poor. The cause is not that the poor do more wrong than the rich, but that there are many more poor to do wrong. Under the McCain-Clinton plan, a cigar-puffing plutocrat will pay a pittance more for the pleasure of smoking while the worker earning $20,000 a year will have to pay the Government nearly one tenth of his total wages.

But it's for his own good, think liberals who have just delightedly discovered the disincentive of taxation. Because smoking is filthy and unhealthy, we are helping the poor person who dares to indulge his lust to smoke by making him pay a whopping fine. He'll stop smoking or go broke.

The tobacco-bashers don't even whisper that because 50 million bumper stickers would soon appear saying ''I smoke and I vote.'' Instead, the campaign against everybody smoking is pegged on saving the children.

Using that unassailable aim, tax-and-spend politicians would make adult smokers, who do well over 90 percent of the smoking, pay up to two bucks a pack more for their habit -- supposedly to discourage teen smokers by making the purchase too costly for those on a parental allowance.

Even if the protect-the-kids pitch were true and not just a political adman's deft mode of persuasion, it would mean that rich kids could smoke and poor kids could not.

Do we really want officialdom to introduce the horrors of economic inequity to 13-year-olds? If the Katzenjammer kids see rich Rollo taking a deep drag on a pleasure only he can afford, are they not given an incentive to steal it -- thereby creating a lifelong habit of crime? Or to buy a pack around the corner from an entrepreneur who buys tobacco in bulk and rolls it into tax-evasive, affordable coffin nails?

Not only would the smokiller's currently popular plan place a huge tax on the poor and make the Government dependent on the prolongation of the tobacco habit, it would make smoking an even greater symbol of youthful rebellion.

That's why the current cockiness among legislators in Washington -- riding a popular wave of revulsion at the past lies of tobacco executives -- is so wrongheaded. The victors won't settle for the sort of medium self-immolation negotiated out of the tobacco industry by state attorneys general; they want financial punishment to satisfy the most ardent smoker-haters and ease the way for Washington's big spenders.

Small wonder that the industry, showing prudent concern for its customers, stockholders and employees, refuses to trade away constitutional rights to advertise a dangerous product that lawmakers do not have the courage to outlaw.

The tax-'em-to-death notion is a huge hoax designed to raise regressive sales taxes painlessly. Such taxing is no good for you just as smoking is no good for you.

The difference is that taxation stunts economic growth but smoking kills. I quit smoking 30 years ago because I have the yen to survive, but I have no right to live off those foolish enough to smoke. How, then, to help others kick the habit without making Government a smoking-tax addict?

Control nicotine as the drug it is. Take the big marketing concessions squeezed out of the chastened industry before the deal-breakers waded in. And set an example for your own kids.