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SUMMARY

Keeping our eyes on the prize.  
 Global Warming and Energy Independence.  A commingled energy strategy to achieve these two goals.
An Energy Management Strategy for a Very Coal-Conflicted Government
 (The author's particular notion on how we might end Global Warming.  Easier said than done, but it can be done.)

Planet Earth's journey to the end of Global Warming depends little on the ineffective 'Green Activism' currently in vogue in many of the world's energy-dependent countries.  Global Warming's beginnings and its end lie mainly in the industrial decisions these countries made and will make.

Global Warming happened, in part, because we lost the courage to complete President Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” transition from coal electricity to nuclear electricity after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.   Industrial societies must have abundant cheap energy to survive so the motive to build nuclear powered electricity plants back then was to produce “Electricity Too Cheap to Meter."  Naive sounding today, but a far wiser goal than we realized at the time.

Tragically, we abandoned nuclear electricity after Three Mile Island and shut down our three spent nuclear fuel recycling facilities.  Responding to hysterical media-driven fears, the government wrote draconian regulations to suppress nuclear's future development and tried to persuade the world to follow our lead. 

This fostered the global explosion of fossil fuel burning to make electricity that brought Global Warming into full bloom.  The world now has 143,000 operating fossil-fuel electricity generating units - almost all fossil fuel.  Between 1960 and 2005, world electricity use quadrupled and it is mostly fossil fuel power plants that have brought us Global Warming.

Three Mile Island's unfounded, but paralyzing, nuclear fears remain to this day, causing us to ignore the fact that whatever the problems of nuclear, they are nothing compared to Climate Change.  In fact, we will need more energy than fossil fuels can provide to surmount Global Warming's challenges over the coming years.  Per Joule, BTU, or kilowatt hour, nuclear is by far the safest, cleanest, and most powerful form of energy man has ever achieved.  There is nothing else.

 

Getting Back On The Nuclear Track is the Only Way We Can Quickly End Global Warming

1. COAL power plants are 10-story high automated coal burners that eat a mile-long train of coal every day.  They are weapons of mass combustion.  Converting coal-burning power plant boilers to Mininuke reactor boilers destroys a power plant's ability to burn the coal that produces about 70% of Global Warming's accumulating CO2.   This alone will delay Global Warming's "Tipping Point" from about 2035 to about 2085

(Coal trains in Conway rail yard, Pittsburgh, PA.) >

Without having to build and pay for new power plants and their supporting grid transmission lines, substations, cooling water systems, roads, and railroads.  Power plants are the world's biggest, easiest, cheapest, sitting duck CO2 targets.  World wide, at $1 per watt, repowering all 143,000 power plants in the world could cost about 3 trillion dollars or about 500 dollars for every person on earth and take a minimum of 5 years.  For the U.S., it would take about 600 billion dollars.

 

2. NATURAL GAS - the 'swing' fuel,  makes 2/3 as much CO2 as coal.  Ending the burning of natural gas with 'Hybrid' nuclear power plants could remove another 35% of the accumulating Global Warming CO2.   Combining measures 1 and 2 would bring Global Warming's advance to a halt - the fabled end of Global Warming's growth.

It's simple:  (1) Wherever we are burning natural gas to make electricity, convert to nuclear.  (2) Wherever we are burning natural gas to make heat, convert to electric heat.  (3) Use natural gas as feedstock for synthetic gasoline and diesel instead of importing natural oil.  'Hybrid' nuclear power plants using Mininuke reactors could be quickly built alongside existing coal burning power plants for little more cost than today's coal burning power plants.  This would take advantage of the already existing electrical infrastructure.  For the U.S., as many as 200 additional one billion dollar 500-megawatt Hybrid nuclear power plants would be needed.

 

3. OIL makes as much CO2 as coal.  As an energy source, oil has no equal.  It will always be the best way to move a vehicle.  Using the natural gas we stopped burning as feedstock, and nuclear heat to power the synthesis process, we could almost exactly replace the oil we are now importing.  Later,  Switching to carbon-neutral oil could remove as much as another 70% of the accumulating Global Warming CO2 while, at the same time, maintaining our oil energy independence.  Combining measures 1, 2, and 3, nature would restore our damaged atmosphere back to normal in about 100 years.

The world's transportation needs will always require large amounts of the concentrated precision energy that only oil can provide.  Fossil oil comes from ancient algae that never got a chance to rot.  Modern algae can be grown in unlimited amounts in Gulf Coast ponds, harvested, and processed into fossil-crude-identical modern carbon-neutral crude oil using nuclear heat.

Using nuclear heat to produce both the needed hydrogen and to drive the hydrogenation reaction, the cost for carbon-neutral hydrogenated oil made from algae/biomass feedstock could fall in the 80 dollars a barrel range and take about 10 years to reach a 50% pumped oil replacement level.  A physically huge task, for the U.S., about 3 million tons of algae per day (17,000 railroad car loads of algae and 400 processing plants) would be needed to replace all our CO2-dirty fossil pumped crude oil needs with CO2-clean carbon-neutral manufactured crude oil.  The sheer size of the oil manufacturing industry would at least double the number of people currently employed in the petroleum industry.  This would make it the greatest source of high-paying "green" jobs.

(Image: Man with thorium sphere sized to power a 1 gigawatt LFTR nuclear power plant for a year. 
Coal requires a daily mile-long train.  Nuclear waste is too large?)

 

THIS ROLLS BACK GLOBAL WARMING AND REPAIRS THE ENVIRONMENT:  All three - coal, oil, and natural gas - add up to 175% of what it takes to stop Global Warming’s advance.  This means not only can Global Warming be stopped; the pool of excess CO2 that has accumulated in the atmosphere over the years could be reduced by natural CO2 sequestration at an annual rate of 50% of Global Warming's current growth.

ROLLING BACK GLOBAL WARMING AUTOMATICALLY SECURES ENERGY INDEPENDENCE:   Most nuclear energy experts say there is enough uranium and thorium to last the world forever, so energy Independence is a natural consequence of a country's completely ending Global Warming.

Where would we begin? One step at a time.  By not opening the next coal mine.  By not permitting any more fossil fuel power plants to be built.  By converting existing fossil fuel power plants to nuclear.  By building natural gas to synthetic oil plants here in the United States - on certain retired military bases where there are natural gas and oil pipelines as suggested by the Bush administration for conventional oil refineries.  By having the nuclear industry produce small nuclear powered boilers as licensable industrial products much as boilers are licensed now.

Coal2Nuclear ______________________________________________________________________   top  


 

Preface 
The author's thoughts on ending Global Warming and gaining Energy Independence.  Easier said than done, but it can be done. [about 350 words]

1. COAL power plants are 10-story high automated coal burners that eat a mile-long train of coal every day.  They are weapons of mass combustion. 

Repowering coal-burning power plant boilers to Mininuke reactor boilers destroys a power plant's ability to burn the coal that produces about 70% of Global Warming's accumulating CO2.  This alone will delay Global Warming's "Tipping Point" from about 2035 to about 2085.

(Coal trains in Conway rail yard, Pittsburgh, PA.) >

2. NATURAL GAS - the 'swing' fuel, makes 65% as much CO2 as coal. 

Ending the burning of natural gas with 'Hybrid' and Nuclear Waste Burning nuclear power plants could remove another 35% of the accumulating Global Warming CO2.  Combining measures 1 and 2 would bring Global Warming's advance to a halt - the fabled end of Global Warming's growth.

3. OIL makes as much CO2 as coal.  As an energy source, oil has no equal.  It will always be the best way to move a vehicle.

Using the natural gas we stopped burning as feedstock, and nuclear heat to power the synthesis process, we could almost exactly replace the oil we are now importing.  Later, Switching to carbon-neutral oil could remove as much as another 70% of the accumulating Global Warming CO2 while, at the same time, maintaining our oil energy independence.  Combining measures 1, 2, and 3, nature would restore our damaged atmosphere back to normal in about 100 years.

ENDING ALL THREE ROLLS BACK GLOBAL WARMING AND REPAIRS THE ENVIRONMENT:  All three - coal, oil, and natural gas - add up to 175% of what it takes to stop Global Warming’s advance.  This means not only can Global Warming be stopped; the pool of excess CO2 that has accumulated in the atmosphere over the years could be reduced by natural CO2 sequestration at an annual rate of 50% of Global Warming's current growth.

ROLLING BACK GLOBAL WARMING AUTOMATICALLY SECURES ENERGY INDEPENDENCE:   Most nuclear energy experts say there is enough uranium and thorium to last the world forever, so energy Independence becomes a natural consequence of a country's completely ending Global Warming.

Where would we begin? One step at a time.  By not opening the next coal mine.  By not permitting any more fossil fuel power plants to be built.  By converting existing fossil fuel power plants to nuclear.  By building natural gas to synthetic oil plants here in the United States - on certain retired military bases where there are natural gas and oil pipelines as suggested by the Bush administration for conventional oil refineries.  By having the nuclear industry produce small nuclear powered boilers as licensable industrial products much as boilers are licensed now.

Coal2Nuclear ______________________________________________________________________   top