| Wednesday, May
9, 2001
It hit 100 in the Valley yesterday. To do my part on energy I left the
windows open and the air conditioner off (except for the tiny
ultra-efficient one in the cable room where the servers live).
It's said to be headed north of 100 today too. So to save energy...
With any luck we will get down to the beach house for a few days today.
I'll have granddaughter pictures to bore you with, and I'll get some
fiction writing done.
I don't know if California could open the nuclear plant
that was closed because "it was close to a fault line" back in
the days when people believed the nonsense about how we didn't need more
electricity, we could conserve our way to prosperity, and the "soft
path" would solve all our problems. Of course those artists who sold
this silly view to California are vewwy vewwy quiet now that their
chickens have come home to roost.
Sure, "if only Californians had taken conservation
seriously..." And if only we hadn't had to accommodate and find
jobs for immigrants, and if only we hadn't had to compete with overseas
workers, and if only --- sure lots of if only would lead to a state which
might, just might, get through this crisis on the power plants we have.
Might. But then the crunch would still be inevitable.
Long ago Petr Beckmann pointed out that one didn't need laws requiring
people to conserve diamonds. If you let the price of energy reflect
its true value, then the price will rise, people will conserve as needed,
and if profits get high new power sources will be built. That is Economics
101 as it used to be taught before the days of Wishful Thinking
101-102-103 which are now required courses: required so that you will
accept the 'soft path' hooplah. Which scads of people and nearly all the
politicians did.
If you could conserve your way to prosperity, Bangla Desh would be the
wealthiest nation on earth. After all, they have pretty smart people, who
get the most out of nearly anything there: visit and you will see people
picking up discarded pull rings off soda cans in the hopes that they can
fashion something useful from them. But if all your ingenuity and capital
are devoted to that sort of thing, it tends to depress economic
growth...
The real impact of the Industrial Revolution came with distributed
energy. The quarter horsepower motor. Machine shops that could be set up
in garages. Cheap distributed energy plus human ingenuity almost always
equals prosperity and plenty of it; devoting your talents to conservation
doesn't produce growth, merely survival. Conserving electrons doesn't
always make sense. There are plenty of them in the universe.
The crunch will continue until we have more power plants.
As to what kind of power, two make sense: in the short term, nuclear
fission. We have the technology. France and Japan have done much of the
industrial engineering operations analysis for us, and use US reactor
designs. Three Mile Island was a terribly expensive experiment that showed
that even when everything is done wrong the worst that happens is we lose
an expensive plant; moreover, it showed how to prevent everything from
going wrong.
France and Japan do well by nuclear energy. We could too. With enough
electricity we could cease burning fossil fuels, with great benefit to the
environment. We could also tell our Arab friends to drink their oil or
sell it to someone else, because we could become self-sufficient out of
this hemisphere's oil, using it mostly for transportation while we convert
our cars to electrical over the next thirty years.
Meanwhile we start serious work on solar power satellites. That
requires cheap access to space, but then so does strategic defense. Cheap
access to space requires reusable -- and SAVABLE -- spaceships. Ships, not
ammunition.
We can solve the energy crunch in the short run -- three years -- by
licensing a standard plant design, much as the French and Japanese have
done, and getting the legal harpies -- excuse me, concerned legal eagles
who wish to do well by doing good -- out of the way. Again I point to
France and Japan as examples.
We can solve the long term with solar power, but that requires access
to space, which requires some new rocket engines. I know how to do that,
too: first, give space to all three military services, and give each
service about $2 billion a year to spend any darned way they see fit on
getting usable spacecraft. We used to do things that way: interagency completion
isn't wasteful it's vitally necessary.
Next we give 10 $2 billion contracts to as many companies, with four
year terms: use that money to build the best flying reusable hardware you
know how. At the end of 4 years we will have a flyoff, and the best three
designs will get contracts to continue. The hardware need not make orbit,
but it must be SAVABLE (has a chance of safe landing after failures on
takeoff), REUSABLE (put it into the work statement that it has to fly out
of sight twice in one day), OPERATIONS DRIVEN (must be able to fly often:
say 15 flights in one month).
We built DC/X for under $50 million. Not paper. FLYING HARDWARE. What
man has done, man can aspire to.
My own design would be the SSX Max
Hunter, Genera Graham, and I proposed back
in 1986 and which was built in miniature as DC/X, and flown
successfully by USAF. NASA took it over and burned it up on the first
first flight.
SSX will need new engines, and in fact engine development is the key to
all this, but the way to get those is get some firms competing to build
space ships that need the new engines and let them find ways to develop
them. An enhanced RL-10 at about 1200 psi chamber pressure and using
methane rather than hydrogen may be the answer. There are other concepts
that will work. The thing is to think of them as engines like aircraft
engines and not as rocket ammunition that needs to be used once and once
only.
Once we have cheap access to space, Space Solar Power Satellites work:
every economic model I know shows they are profitable if but only if
the cost of getting the materials to orbit is down around the cost per
pound of air freight. That turns out not to be impossible or even all that
difficult if the R&;D costs for new engines are charged off to
strategic defense (which also needs cheap access to space).
So: that's the way out. I doubt we will take it, but it is the only way
out I see.
Incidentally, if we do build working Space Solar Power Satellites (SSPS),
we will build a scientific base on the Moon and send an expedition to Mars
on third shifts and weekends.
A note: I wrote the above from memory. Apparently at least one of the
nuclear plants that the eco-sillies got closed was re-opened. I may
be wrong in my recollection that there was another closed on eco-freaky
grounds. On
the other hand I know from personal experience that the original San
Onofre reactor, which had at least 20 years useful life remaining, was
closed as part of a deal allowing SCE to bring units Two and Three on
line. It was nucular and thus it was a good thing to get it closed even if
there were two more of the evil things being built. The opposition to
energy by the soft path zealots knew and knows no bounds.
For a critical reply on that see
mail.
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