Is nuclear power the answer to global warming?

Yes

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by Marjorie Hecht

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Yes, we should go nuclearbut not because of so-called "global warming."

We need to go nuclear because it is the most efficient and least costly way to provide the power needed for a growing population in an industrial world. By the year 2050, with modest growth rates, the world will need three times the electricity we produce today.(1) If we don't use the most scientifically advanced systemsnuclear now, and later thermonuclear fusionto supply this power, millions of people will die from cold, hunger, disease, lack of water, and other preventable calamities.

Throughou t history, civilizations have advanced by making use of scientific discoveries and creating new resources in order to support an increasing population with a decreasing land use.(2) Wood was not a resource until man used fire; coal was just a rock in the ground, until man figured out how to burn it. Atoms were just ideas, until man discovered how to split the heaviest atoms and make use of the energy released in fission. If civilization continues, future generations will create new energy resources that we perhaps cannot even think of today.

The Advantages of Nuclear

No other present source of power can compare to the energy density of nuclear. An amount of uranium fuel small enough to hold in your hand, can generate the energy-equivalent of 100 freight cars loaded with coal, or a large tanker full of petroleum. Just 1.86 grams of nuclear fuel equals the output of 23.5 tons of dry wood, or 6.15 tons of coal, or 30 barrels of oil (at 42 gallons each).

Energy flux density is the measure used to compare sources of power, measured in megawatts per square meter. Specifically, this refers to how much power each source produces as it flows through a cross-section of the surface of the energy-producing process, such as a boiler. The more concentrated the energy produced, the more energy efficient and economical that power source is, as the table below shows.

More concentrated energy sources can accomplish things that less energy dense sources cannot. For example, the high heat of a fourth-generation nuclear reactor can efficiently remove the salt from seawater, to make it drinkable. At heats above 700-800 degrees C, we can also cheaply separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, producing a portable fuel that can be used to power automobiles. A solar cell or windmill cannot do this. With thermonuclear fusion power, man tames the power of the Sun. The fusion torch, designed more than 40 years ago, will provide enough energy density to allow us to refine low-grade ores into the scarce elements we need, virtually eliminating resource shortages.

Energy Flux Density (megawatts per square meter)

Solarbiomass .0000001
SolarEarth surface .0002
Solarnear-Earth orbit .001
Fossil 10.0
Fission 50.0 to 200.0
Fusion trillions

As you can see, fission is 5 to 20 times more energy dense than fossil fuels, while fusion (whose fuel is seawater) will be incredibly more efficient.

Solar forms of energy, including wind, are too diffuse to power industry, or a modern societyeven if you wanted to have windmills and mirrors covering more than half the nation's land mass and coastline.

Nuclear reactors have other advantages: Not only do they have no polluting emissions, but their fuel is truly "renewable" 97 percent of spent reactor fuel can be reprocessed into new reactor fuel. There is no "nuclear waste" when spent nuclear fuel is recycled, as the nuclear pioneers in the Atoms for Peace program intended it to be.

In addition, nuclear reactors can do something no other power source can do: Fast breeder reactors can produce more fuel than they burn! Thanks to the natural process of nuclear transmutation, these breeder reactors produce new fuel for other reactors in a "blanket" around the reactor core, while they are producing electricity.

The fourth-generation nuclear reactors, such as South Africa's Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) or General Atomics' Gas-Turbine Modular Helium Reactor (GT-MHR), have other advantages. They are meltdown-proof by design, with tiny fuel particles encased in layers of carbon materials that fully contain the nuclear reaction. The reactors are modular and can be mass produced. They are helium-cooled, and do not have to be located near a water source. Their small size makes them suitable for small power grids in developing countries, or they can be grouped together, with up to six reactors on a site with one control building, for larger power grids. The higher temperatures of these reactors can be used in tandem with industrial processing, such as steel making, or desalination.

The Population Question

Why are some people so fearful of anything "nuclear," or fearful of science and technology in general? And why are some people so eager to believe that "global warming" is a man-created monster eating up the planet?

In brief, the answer is that the industrial power of America after World War II was a threat to the financial forces of the oligarchy, including the British Empire, and they determined that the most efficient way to stop this American industrial giant was to destroy it from the inside, by turning the nation away from technological optimism and a belief in progress. And so, the post-war Baby Boomer generation was saturated with the rock-drugs-sex counterculture, instead of the spirit of the Apollo Program, to turn the youth population into anti-science dummies.

With the manipulated shift in culture in the late 1960s came a ratcheting down in the ability to think, a reliance on "public perception" instead of science, and a "can't do" instead of a "can do" attitude. It used to be that when there was a problem, you used your brains to solve it, instead of wailing about impending doom. As President Kennedy said, "We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

And it used to be that America saw its mission, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, to uplift the rest of the world, freeing it from colonial dominance, wars, and poverty, and bringing the world's population up to the living standards of industrial nations. This generation of youth has the chance, once again, to adopt the optimism which their parents' generation foolishly rejected.

As human beings, we still have the ability (unlike any other species) to solve problems of environment, of poverty, and of disease, and to do it without killing millions of our own species by stopping nuclear energy or stopping "carbon emissions." These anti-science ideas were deliberately promoted to stop progress and to cut back on population, in particular, to cut back black and brown populations.(3)

There is no objection to nuclear energy that cannot be answered rationally. There is no argument for "man-caused global warming" that cannot be refuted rationally. There is absolute certainty that if we don't move forward with advanced technology, America will become a rubble heap of a formerly industrial nation, killing millions of people in the process.

Footnotes

1. For a full discussion of meeting the energy needs of the year 2050, see the article by Massachusetts State Nuclear Engineer Jim Muckerheide, "How to Build 6,000 Nuclear Plants by 2050," http://www.21stcentu rysciencetech.com/Ar ticles%202005/Nuclea r2050.pdf

2. The technical term for this is "relative potential population-density," as defined by economist Lyndon LaRouche. "This term implies a rate of relative improvement, or decadence, or mankind's power to exist, per capita and per square kilometer. These rates are to be studied from the vantage-point of the certainty that the initiatives of sovereign individual minds in discovering, or simply promoting universal physical principles, are the form of functional action which determines the potential for rates of growth of mankind's power to existper capita and per square kilometer of the total territory, taken into account as forming what might be defined, functionally, as a national economy." See for example, LaRouche's "Reanimating a National Economy," http://www.larouchep ub.com/lar/2006/3331 animate_real_econ.ht ml

3. Lord Bertrand Russell, a most evil Malthusian, wrote frankly about the need for reducing population by "wars, pestilence, and famines," or food control managed by a world government. See, for example, Russell's The Impact of Science on Society (1952), reprinted in 1998 by Routledge.

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