The single most important human component in the preservation of the Earth’s environment is energy. Industrial conversion of energy into forms that are useful for human activities is the most important aspect of technology.

Abundant inexpensive energy is required for the prosperous maintenance of human life and the continued advance of life-enriching technology. People who are prosperous have the wealth required to protect and enhance their natural environment.

Currently, the United States is a net importer of energy. Americans spend about $300 billion per year for imported oil and gas — and an additional amount for military expenses related to those imports.

Political calls for — in the words of the “7 Point Pledge” announced by Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid — cutting “global warming pollution in developed countries by 90-percent” are obviously impractical. A 90-percent reduction of U.S. hydrocarbon use would eliminate 75 percent of America’s energy supply, and this 75 percent of U.S. energy cannot be replaced by alternative “green” sources. Despite enormous tax subsidies over the past 30 years, green sources still provide only 0.3 percent of U.S. energy.

Technological Options

The United States clearly cannot continue to be a large net importer of energy without losing its economic and industrial strength and its political independence. It should, instead, be a net exporter of energy.

There are three realistic technological paths to American energy independence: increased production of hydrocarbon energy, nuclear energy, or both. “Global warming” alarmism notwithstanding, there are no climatological impediments to increased use of hydrocarbons, although local environmental effects can and must be accommodated. Human use of hydrocarbons is not measurably affecting the Earth’s climate. Nuclear energy is, in fact, less expensive and more environmentally benign than hydrocarbon energy, but it too has been the victim of the politics of fear and claimed disadvantages and dangers that are actually negligible.

For example, the “problem” of high-level “nuclear waste” from nuclear power plants has been given much attention, but this problem has been politically created by U.S. government barriers to American fuel breeding and reprocessing. Spent nuclear fuel can be recycled into new nuclear fuel. It need not be stored in expensive repositories.

Reactor accidents are also much publicized, but there has never been even one human death associated with an American nuclear power reactor incident. By contrast, American dependence on automobiles results in more than 40,000 human deaths per year.

All forms of energy generation, including “green” methods, entail industrial deaths in the mining, manufacture, and transport of resources they require. Nuclear energy requires the smallest amount of such resources and therefore has the lowest risk of deaths.

Estimated relative costs of electrical energy production vary with geographical location and underlying assumptions. Nuclear energy is the least expensive. At present, 43 percent of U.S. energy consumption is used for electricity production.

To be sure, future inventions in energy technology may alter the relative economics of nuclear, hydrocarbon, solar, wind, and other methods of energy generation. These inventions cannot, however, be forced by political fiat, nor can they be wished into existence. Alternatively, “conservation,” if practiced so extensively as to be an alternative to hydrocarbon and nuclear power, is merely a politically correct word for “poverty.”

Behind the Stagnation

The current untenable situation in which — at assumed costs of $60 per barrel for oil and $7 per 1,000 ft³ for gas — the United States is losing $300 billion per year to pay for foreign oil and gas is not the result of failures of government energy production efforts. The U.S. government does not produce energy. Energy is produced by private industry. Why then has energy production thrived abroad while domestic production has stagnated?

This stagnation has been caused by U.S. government taxation, regulation, land lock-ups, and sponsorship of litigation — all of which have made the United States a very unfavorable place to produce energy. In addition, the U.S. government has spent vast sums of tax money to subsidize inferior energy technologies for political purposes.

It is not necessary to discern in advance the best course to follow. Legislative repeal of taxation, regulation, and incentives to litigate, as well as the repeal of all subsidies of energy-generation industries, would stimulate industrial development, wherein competition could then automatically determine the best technological paths for energy production.

Nuclear power is safer, less expensive, and more environmentally benign than hydrocarbon power, so it is probably the better choice for increased energy production. Solid, liquid, and gaseous hydrocarbon fuels provide, however, many conveniences, and a national infrastructure to use them is already in place. Oil from shale or coal liquefaction is less expensive than crude oil at current prices, but its ongoing production costs are higher than those for already-developed oil fields. There is, therefore, an investment risk that crude oil prices could drop so low that liquefaction plants could not compete. Nuclear energy does not have this disadvantage, since the operating costs of nuclear power plants are very low.

Nuclear Option

Consider, for example, one practical and environmentally sound path to U.S. energy independence.

At present, 19 percent of U.S. electricity is produced by 104 nuclear power reactors, with an average generating output in 2006 of 870 megawatts per reactor, for a total of about 90 GWe (gigawatts). If this were increased by 560 GWe, nuclear power could fill 100 percent of our current U.S. electricity requirements with an additional 230 GWe left over for export as electricity or as hydrocarbon fuels replaced or manufactured.

Thus, rather than a $300 billion trade loss, the United States would have a $200 billion trade surplus — and installed capacity for future U.S. requirements. Moreover, if heat from additional nuclear reactors were used for coal liquefaction and gasification, the United States would not even need to use its oil resources. The United States has about 25 percent of the world’s coal reserves. The heat from nuclear reactors could also be used to liquefy biomass, trash, or other sources of hydrocarbons that might eventually prove practical.

The Palo Verde nuclear power station near Phoenix, Arizona, was originally intended to have 10 nuclear reactors with a generating capacity of 1,243 megawatts each. As a result of public hysteria caused by false information — very similar to the human-caused global warming hysteria being spread today — construction at Palo Verde was stopped with only three operating reactors completed. This installation is sited on 4,000 acres of land and is cooled by wastewater from the city of Phoenix, which is a few miles away. An area of 4,000 acres is equivalent to a square 2.5 miles on a side. The power station itself occupies only a small part of this total area.

If just one station like Palo Verde were built in each of the 50 states and each installation included 10 reactors as originally planned for Palo Verde, these plants, operating at the current 90 percent of design capacity, would collectively produce 560 GWe of electricity. Nuclear technology has advanced substantially since Palo Verde was built, so plants constructed today would be even more reliable and efficient. The delivered cost of this electricity would be between 3 and 5 cents per kilowatt hour, which is substantially lower than most current U.S. prices.

Assuming a construction cost of $2.3 billion per 1,200 MWe reactor and 15-percent economies of scale, the total cost of this entire project would be $1 trillion — the equivalent of four months of the current federal budget or eight percent of the annual U.S. gross domestic product. Construction costs could be repaid in just a few years by the capital now spent by the people of the United States for foreign oil and by the change from U.S. import to export of energy.

The 50 nuclear installations might be sited on a population basis. If so, California would have six, while Oregon and Idaho together would have one. In view of the great economic value of these facilities, there would be vigorous competition for them.

In addition to these power plants, the United States should build fuel reprocessing capability, so that spent nuclear fuel can be reused. This would lower fuel cost and eliminate the storage of high-level nuclear waste. Fuel for the reactors can be assured for 1,000 years by using both ordinary reactors with high breeding ratios and specific breeder reactors, so that more fuel is produced than consumed. Long before the nuclear fuels in use today were exhausted, new energy technologies would surely be invented.

Technological advances reduce cost, but usually not abruptly. A prescient call in 1800 for the world to change from wood to methane would have been impracticably ahead of its time, as may be a call today for an abrupt change from oil and gas to hydrogen. In distinguishing the practical from the futuristic, a free market in energy is absolutely essential.

Surely these are better outcomes than are available through international rationing and taxation of energy as has been recently proposed. This nuclear energy example demonstrates that current technology can produce abundant inexpensive energy if it is not politically suppressed.

There need be no vast government program to achieve this goal. It could be reached simply by legislatively removing all taxation, most regulation and litigation, and all subsidies from all forms of energy production in the United States, thereby allowing the free market to build the most practical mixture of methods of energy generation.

With abundant and inexpensive energy, American industry could be revitalized, and the capital and energy required for further industrial and technological advance could be assured. Also assured would be the continued and increased prosperity of all Americans.

Arthur B. Robinson, Ph.D. is a laboratory researcher and professor of chemistry at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM). He is also the publisher/editor of the Access to Energy newsletter. Noah E. Robinson, Ph.D. is a researcher and professor of chemistry at the OISM. This article is an adapted excerpt from their more extensive article entitled “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” which appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. A PDF of the full article, including source citations, is available at the Journal’s website at www.jpands.org/vol12no3/robinson600.pdf.