D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
April
2008
No Nukes Is Bad Nukes
A glowing endorsement of a solution to our energy woes.
I was having lunch with a friend of mine the other day at a local Choke 'n Puke, and was somewhat put off by his dour demeanor. "Jumpin' Jehosaphet on a stick," I asked. "Why so down in the mouth?"
Looking like a man with a live-in mother-in-law, he mumbled, "I can't stand to look at the gas needle in my truck." He traced patterns in his ketchup with a limp, greasy French fry. "When it's empty, I can't afford to fill it up. When it's full, I can't afford this French fry." My friend was actually considering trading in his perfectly broken-in pickup, with the busted grille and the cow-turd patina, for a fuel-efficient vehicle that couldn't even properly transport a keg of beer in an upright position.
You must understand that none of my posse owns something as fatuous as a Subaru or as stylish as a hybrid. The villains I associate with generally pilot Forrestal-class vehicles capable of hauling vast loads of firewood, plumbing supplies, flatbed trailers or families larger than most minor-league baseball teams. The realities of life override the concessions of smaller, more efficient vehicles. Have you ever seen a Toyota Prius hitched up to a horse trailer? So we land-yacht captains must pay a penalty for our petro-chemically squanderous lifestyles.
Not that the price of gasoline is unfair. Heck, it's perfectly understandable why it costs so much, and I'm surprised it doesn't cost more. As Americans, we've had a backstage pass to the cheap fuel jam session for way longer than the rest of the globe. Currently, Europeans are paying the equivalent of about $7.50 a gallon for gas. We still have it good, but it's going to get worse, and it's important to know why.
Big oil likes their job. Imagine getting up for work each morning knowing you're going to make a billion dollars. This is because they sell a product that everybody needs and nobody can do without. As good as this business model sounds, their jobs have been made even better by the unwitting actions of reactionary bureaucrats and weekend environmentalists.
Any good Al Gore automaton knows how years of red-state capitalism have damaged the environment. That's why the Birkenstock battalions decided years ago that things like nuclear reactors and oil refineries and cars are evil, which is true if you believe that energy should be free, which the laws of physics don't agree with. It seems that no new refineries have been built in America in over 28 years or so, and some of my more radical amigos claim this is because of the environmentalists. Well, yes and no.
Oil companies are obviously greedy, money-grubbing capitalist bastards, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Increasing government regulations on refineries make it harder, but not impossible to build a refinery. But it's cheaper — and easier — to expand the ones that already exist, or build new ones in nations that want economic development to the extent that the natives will work in exchange for pancakes, which cuts down on overhead. With the end of the gasoline car in sight, however, and huge government subsidies to produce a mandated amount of ethanol, why invest big bucks in equipment that has an expiration date? Never mind that the advantages of ethanol are already in big-time doubt — amount of return on energy invested, effect on corn and grain prices. Gasoline is nearly obsolete, and the government's goals for ethanol use mean that projected gas production by 2017 will be less than what's being produced today.
None of this really should come as a surprise. Ever since the gas lines of the early 1970s, we have been told that the gas would run out. We've had over 30 years to come up with a solution, and the best we can do is more fuel-efficient gasoline cars and unworkable alternatives like hydrogen, ethanol and electricity. Hydrogen requires vast amounts of electricity to produce (those pesky atoms want to bond with everything in sight), ethanol has a questionable amount of positive net energy produced, and electricity still primarily requires the burning of fossil fuels, which is how we got to this point anyway.
So I am about to commit heresy of the highest order: Why can't Americans be more like the French?
I don't mean in a cheese-eating-surrender-monkey kind of way, but in an energy-policy kind of way. See, after the first energy crises of the 1970s, the French government put on their big-boy knickers and decided to fully commit to nuclear power. Today, France has 59 nuclear power plants generating over 75 percent of their electricity (an additional 15 percent comes from hydro-electric sources). Because of this, Pierre enjoys some of the lowest electricity costs in Europe, and France has an extremely low level of CO2 emissions per capita for electricity generation. Pierre also minimizes the waste issues by reclaiming and recycling materials from expended nuclear fuel, eventually leaving just three percent of the used fuel as high-level waste to be stored in underground bunkers (where Godzilla will eventually be born).
Nuclear energy is our solution. Modern reactor designs are safer than ever, new technologies allow reclaiming much of the radioactive waste, and we now have Iraq available to store what's left thanks to W's land-reclamation program. Clean nuclear energy gives us the "green" energy to produce hydrogen fuel, or to be able to justify cars that plug into wall sockets, without merely shifting the fossil-energy chain to other sources.
The very groups that have tried to preserve the earth are the very ones that have brought us to this moment in time. Environmental groups have fought attempts at developing nuclear power plants, have protested the damming of rivers for hydro-electric power, have even cried out about wind generators chopping up wayward birds. And while our friends the French have achieved true energy independence, they have yet to apply it to their roadways. While Francois still slogs through the latest workers' strike traffic in a diesel-powered Peugeot, we Americans would have the ability to fully develop alternative-energy transportation, whether it's hydrogen or electric vehicles.
How about one of our presidential hopefuls making this one of their policy goals? Achieving energy independence solves so many of our problems, both domestically and internationally, that it's a no-brainer. And if the unwashed, antediluvian hippies still want to oppose nuclear energy, then I challenge 'em to come up with a better idea. It had better be a good one, because this ol' cowboy's pickup doesn't run on hot air.