Can the US confront global warming without adding more nuclear power?

Yes

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by G.R.L. Cowan

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Imagine yourself trapped in a sunken submarine, like the SSN San Francisco if it had hit that undersea mountain a little harder.

In the real event only one sailor died, but many were injured. Many more would have died if the nuclear powerplant, placid and tough as only a nuke can be, had not got them all back to port. The predicament I want you to imagine is if only you had survived; perhaps you were a guest scientist, the only person on the boat without several previous subsea tours, and without comprehensive training in all of its systems. Maybe you're not a landlubber, but you're definitely a surfacelubber. So you've got to figure things out.

There's plenty of food and water, and as the only one still breathing, you've got a lot of air, a whole hull-full, to breathe. But your scientific background makes you aware that you need a lot. If rescue doesn't come, you could find yourself inhaling the same lungfuls you exhaled several times before, and suffocating, within weeks.

So out of all the stopped systems on board, the ones whose restart most concerns you are the air scrubbers. You know the lungful of stale air that will kill you won't be short of oxygen, rather, it will be overloaded with carbon dioxide.

The scrubbers were easily keeping that problem at bay before the crash, and you quickly get one of them started again. The ship's many-tonne battery bank was in a good state of charge at the moment when everything got turned off, so you begin to feel confident. You can await rescue, even if it takes months.

It's getting chilly. The deep sea is cold - almost cold enough to freeze fresh water - and its chill is coming through the hull. It is planning to stay.

No problem: you raid the kitchen, or whatever they call it, and make a coffee can into an oil burner.

There's plenty of cooking oil, and you know each gallon of it gives as much heat as a tonne of battery would, if you were crazy enough to use the electric heaters, so again you feel resourceful.

But then you notice something odd. Shortly after you have used your oil-burner to warm up the compartment you have the reactivated scrubber in, it quits. Nothing you do gets it going again. You fetch another and it, too, dies. You notice it has a warning label: FEED MUST NOT EXCEED 0.05 PERCENT CO2.

They all do, except some late-model ones on which the warning is printed in larger letters, in a brighter hue of red. These newer ones don't seem to die any differently, but they say zero point zero four, so you figure that's where the older ones were dying too, and their warning labels were optimistic.

Zero point zero 'X' percent CO2 is a concentration you can breathe. But if it kills all the scrubbers, it will certainly kill you too, for when you breathe in 0.0x, you breathe out substantially more. Without the scrubbers, you will die like a child trapped in the baggage compartment of an old car.

Your plans to find out whether the noises you've been hearing are, as you suspect, made by the only other survivor, a beautiful marine biologist of the opposite sex, are suddenly cast in a different light. The two of you will not be the progenitors of a new subsea tribe that will live on, in that submarine, long after the two of you are gone, your fantastic stories of an outer world fondly but skeptically remembered.

Not unless you don't mind that tribe's being the Shivering People, or you find some large, reliable CO2 eater to take over from the scrubbers ... or you find some source of heat other than oil reserves. It sure would be nice to get the reactor going again.

The scrubbers' frailty makes that submarine a pretty good scale model for the Earth. Like the Earth, the boat has uranium on board that can keep it clean and warm for many generations. Like the Earth, the boat has a history of getting large amounts of power from uranium.

To make the boat a little more like our present situation, let's imagine the kitchen is inhabited by strange little creatures who like to eat empty oil containers, so much so that you aren't certain they can eat anything else. When there was a whole crew to feed, these creatures were comfortable, but now, with only you and the marine biologist to drive oil demand, they don't favour your using the cooking oil only as cooking oil.

Only they do favour this - loudly. They stand on an empty cooking oil container, already slightly nibbled, to get nearer your eye level when making their case. They do not seem to understand exactly how a reactor restart would inconvenience them, but they strongly oppose it. They insist that the submarine is not all that deep; there is sunlight. It should be no problem at all for you to put some solar cells on the hull.

Some of them declare themselves tired of supporting your oil habit. Others say the scrubbers won't fail, the warning labels are lies from the empty-oil-container lobby - of which they do not seem to understand they are themselves members - and past scrubber failures are meaningless coincidence.

If it's the Earth we're now talking about, we can definitely improve the scrubbers; there are very abundant minerals that already act as very slow scrubbers, too slow to help, but if we pulverize them, we can speed them up to any necessary degree.

By doing this, we can accommodate the kitchen creatures, whom we know as civil servants, government contractors, and other recipients of (oil and gas tax revenues)(cooking oil containers). Or perhaps we don't know this, but we strongly suspect it. Something's making the containers disappear.

We can accommodate them for as long as the oil supply holds out.

But we can also restart the reactor. That's certainly our best bet, and it's probably not that great a hardship for the kitchen creatures to live on food like the rest of us; in which case we can all live a lot longer. Many times longer than it will take to figure out how to move the boat to where the sun really does shine.

We'll know we're there when the kitchen creatures suddenly stop liking the idea of solar cells.

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