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The Energy Future of America
As I begin to write this chapter, I become aware that I am leaning against the wall, with my back to the window, trying to make the most of the last bit of daylight. In a state like Virginia that uses mostly coal, in country that remains the world’s per capita energy hog, with the whole history of coal and four generations of Welsh miners on my back, I’m in an impossible fix. Flipping a switch revs the engines of a dragline. But eventually dusk will come and then dark, and even if I neglect to turn on the light, the bright screen of my computer plugged into the wall will gleam back at me, reminding me that we are still sapping the grid.
Not far from where I sit in my home in Northern Virginia, the Greco-Roman facades of marble and local shale in downtown Washington, D.C. remind us of the past. Consistent with its stately architecture, our nation’s capital has remained firmly with tradition in terms of energy. In a nation built by coal, D.C. was powered exclusively by fossil fuels instead of a more varied energy portfolio as of 2005. In a country whose history boasts some of the most revolutionary inventions of all time, our capital has yet to lead the way in energy innovation. The Potomac River Generating Station—near the borders of Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia—is a relic of one of these inventions: the coal-fired power plant first demonstrated by Thomas Edison on Manhattan Island. More than one hundred years later, this plant operates on technology not much more advanced than Edison’s, and it has supplied the energy margin for the District for over fifty years.
“Coal is affordable and coal is available right here in the United States of America,” former President George W. Bush declared before the West Virginia Coal Association. In a parting gesture in December 2008, Bush sponsored a modification of the wording in the Clean Water Act, allowing coal companies to dump mining refuse in streambeds. Not long after President Obama stepped into the White House, the EPA asserted its authority by announcing its intentions to review some MTR permits. Immediate outcries from the coal mining industry and its supporters voiced fears that the EPA’s involvement would threaten jobs and the tax base. One writer asserted that this was an attack from “environmental zealots” that ranked people “lower than vegetation.” The agency’s decision was lauded from other quarters as the only hope against “poisoned water, abandoned towns, and a toxic future.” Although the EPA backed off after discussions with coal companies, this move at the beginning of Obama’s administration had coal advocates and coal adversaries poised for mobilization on the opposites sides of the front.
Despite the fact that coal is cheap and our most plentiful energy resource, it is also our most problematic—a fact that is acknowledged across the board. According to National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) Climate Center Directors David G. Hawkins and Daniel A. Lashof, and to Robert H. Williams, a research scientist at Princeton: “coal production and conversion to useful energy [is] one of the most destructive activities on the planet.” This sentiment was even reaffirmed by Spencer Abraham, the US secretary of energy during the first Bush administration: “Coal is an energy winner with one glaring drawback: it is among the most environmentally problematic of all energy resources.”
Coal is energy in one of its most impure forms. This rock of ancient marine and tree decay is mixed with sulfur, which, when released into the atmosphere, returns to the earth as acid rain. Coal often contains traces of poisonous metals like arsenic, fluorine, and selenium. In developing countries, these metals are causing significant health problems for individuals that burn coal in household stoves and fires. Coal also contains radioactive chemicals, such as uranium and thorium, and more than thirty years ago it was discovered that radioactive poisoning from coal burning plants has a more significant impact on the surrounding populace than routine radioactive emanations from nuclear power plants.
The Potomac River Generating Station is no more than seven miles from my home in Alexandria, Virginia. The technology in this plant is antiquated, and the output for much of its recent operation is illegal by current emission standards. Five smokestacks stand tall over the Potomac, still sending soot into the air. Our nation’s capital must be fueled, even at the cost of ignoring its own legislation.
This is not the only grandfathered power plant in Virginia. Eight out of the ten coal burning plants in the state are outdated, pouring thousands of tons of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide into the air. These oxides cause ozone smog, which descends heavily on Northern Virginia during the summer months, aggravating lungs, including my own. On these inversion days, I feel the pollution before I smell it or see it. The air takes on almost a granular quality. There is a lightness in my breath, and I know if I go running I will come home early with my head pounding and the taste of blood in my mouth.
Asthmatics are not the only victims of coal pollution. Many of Virginia’s streams have become too acidic to support trout, and the greatest threat to the Chesapeake Bay is nitrogen, a substantial amount of which enters the water from the air. Virginia farmers lose millions of dollars of cotton, soy, wheat, barley, and peanut crops each year to ozone smog.
If the immediate health impacts do not present a sufficient case, there is also the fact that coal burning is the leading contributor to global warming. If the eight grandfathered coal plants in Virginia were brought up to current environmental standards, it would be equivalent to taking four million cars off the road. Coal fired power plants are the leading producers of carbon dioxide (CO2), and the United States tops the world in CO2 emissions, producing 25 percent of the global total for 4 percent the world’s population. 2000 to 2009 was the hottest decade. The long-reaching effects of coal have the potential of bringing on environmental disasters more destructive to human life than the whole history of coal mining explosions.
Under the Obama administration, hot debate rages in Washington, D.C., between agencies with competing ideologies that lobby for the energy future of America. Some fear a “carbon-constricted future,” and others the “coal rush”—the rapid increase in coal burning plants being built or on the drawing table. Policies are made on the city and state level concerning the fate of coal, but with our country on the brink of an energy crisis, considerable power lies within the national realm to make decisions with far reaching consequences. Civilizations have risen or fallen based on their use of resources.
The United Mine Workers of America is among the organizations that send advocates to the national legislature to lobby for coal. This is part of its primary purpose: to preserve the jobs, benefits, and rights of the coal miners and other workers it represents. Despite the corruption during the John L. Lewis and Tony Boyle administrations, the UMWA has played a significant role in the history of coal mining. Founded in 1890 in a merger between the Knights of Labor and the National Progressive Union of Miners, the UMWA pushed through the eight-hour workday in 1898. They are responsible for the many of the major mining clashes throughout the twentieth century: the Latimer Massacre, the Battle of Virden, the Ludlow Massacre, the Battle of Blair Mountain, the Herrin Massacre, the Besco Strike, and the Harlan County War. UMWA rabble-rousers such as Demolli and Mother Jones pepper the history of my mining ancestors. In its heyday, during the reign of Lewis in 1920, the union represented half a million miners; the UMWA currently speaks for two hundred thousand—30 percent of American miners.
The UMWA’s D.C. office is located in Northern Virginia near my home. The decor in the lobby and halls was Spartan; nothing but large black and white photographs of miners hung on the walls, giving the office the feel of a coal miner’s hall of fame, memorializing man’s epic encounter with the earth in search of energy. In the conference room hung almost Chuck Close-sized portraits of union leaders: John L. Lewis and the current president, Cecil E. Roberts.
Phil Smith filled a leather upholstered chair with his broad shoulders, projecting a brawny but articulate competence. He is the communications director at the UMWA and looked the part of a miner made union leader, but he had spent all of his working life behind a desk. His father was an organizer in a steel union in Texas and inspired Smith to become a “student of labor history.” When I asked Smith about the energy future of coal, he leaned back in his chair confidently: “We believe coal has a strong future. Right now, 53 percent of our energy is generated from coal. If you set aside the improvements in technology that we anticipate in the next fifteen to twenty years, coal would still play a large role in generating electricity for the next twenty to twenty-five years. Right now, nothing can replace that, and that’s just a technological fact. There aren’t enough wind farms and there aren’t enough solar farms, nuclear power, hydroelectric power, however you want to put it. So we’re going to continue burning coal, but the good news is that as we move forward, the development of carbon capture sequestration technology is going to play a huge role, maintaining coal as a key base of our energy. If that technology can be developed and implemented, there’s another hundred years of easily recoverable coal. There’s another hundred years after that of coal that’s going to be a little bit harder to get at.”
Wind and solar energy are gaining greater portions of the market share, but even if the technology is there, the implementation is not. Smith is correct: coal is going to continue to be America’s leading energy source for some years to come as long as there is the political will to burn it. Our society is reliant on coal; it’s a security we are reluctant to give up. In a recent Senate hearing concerning carbon capture sequestration, Senator Byron L. Dorgan confirmed this sentiment: “We’re seeing a lot of new things happening in the renewable fuels area. But this should not suggest that we are not going to use our fossil fuels. We are. I don’t think anyone believes that somehow in a short, intermediate, or long term that we’re not going to continue to use fossil fuels. The question isn’t ‘whether.’ The question is under what conditions we use them.”
According to Smith, carbon capture sequestration (removing and storing the carbon dioxide from gases released by burning fossil fuel, thus preventing it from reaching the atmosphere) would cost a billion dollars a year to develop and commercialize. Carl O. Baur, Director of the National Energy Technology Laboratory, testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that the “economics are prohibitively expensive.” If the carbon dioxide emissions were captured from just half of the coal fired power plants in the United States, on average our electricity costs would rise from twenty-five to eighty dollars a megawatt.
Under the restrictions of a carbon constrained world and possible carbon cap and trade legislation, carbon-capture technologies are the coal industry’s best bet, and interested parties have been quick to adopt “clean coal” rhetoric in promoting its implementation. The American Coal Council (ACC) is among the organizations at the forefront of the D.C. political debate. Janet Gellici, its CEO, has been with the council since its onset. Middle-aged, with gray hair down to her shoulders, her history in coal is similar to mine: her great-grandfather mined coal in Pennsylvania. In addition to her responsibilities at the ACC, she serves on the National Coal Council (a governmental advisory board) and on the board of directors for the Women’s Mining Coalition. Although the ACC sends representatives to congressional hearings on energy, according to Gellici, it is not a lobbying group: “We deal with the full spectrum of the coal chain from extraction to the end consumer, to energy traders, and coal support services. The American Coal Council is not a lobbying organization, but advances the business interests of coal.”
The ACC represents over 160 coal traders, coal suppliers, coal transportation companies, coal support service firms, and coal consumers in North and South America, and one of the goals listed on the ACC’s website is promoting coal as “an economic, abundant/secure and environmentally sound energy fuel source.” Environmental and coal are two words the carbon industry has been eager to tag team. This is a perspective Gellici was also eager to propagate: “The industry is making strides towards clean coal technology. There’s a lot of hope there, but it depends on the political will for carbon capture. Energy generation needs to be done cleanly. I don’t think anybody in the industry would disagree with that.”
As an example, Gellici mentioned a plant in Beulah, North Dakota. She was speaking of the Great Plains Synfuels Plant, which manufactures natural gas from lignite coal, a loosely bound solid. Lignite is the lowest grade of coal, containing only 25 to 35 percent carbon. Bituminous, burned by most plants in the United States, is a soft coal that consists of many impurities mixed with its 60 to 80 percent carbon. Anthracite is the rarest and hardest. Made of at least 90 percent carbon, anthracite is difficult to ignite and burns with a low blue flame. Most plants would not deem extracting energy from lignite worth the effort, but the Great Plains Synfuels Plant began operation in 1984 as a collaborative project between several energy companies and the Department of Energy (DOE) and is currently the cleanest energy plant in North Dakota, capturing two-thirds of its CO2. This CO2 then travels through pipes to the oil fields of Saskatchewan, Canada, where it is used in oil recovery projects.
According to Gellici, there are several other options for generating coal-powered energy besides traditional pulverized coal plants, which transmit only 30 to 40 percent of the energy contained in the coal to the power lines. New Supercritical and Ultra Supercritical coal burning plants can achieve 10 to 20 percent more efficiency by increasing the heat and the pressure at which the coal is burned. Intensified heat and pressure produce a higher quality steam in a supercritical state, where the difference between a gas and liquid is indeterminable. There are four hundred Supercritical and Ultra Supercritical coal plants around the world; despite China’s ascent to the world’s top CO2 polluter, the Chinese build one of these plants every month. The United States has been much slower to retire old plants and take advantage of this new technology. Almost all of our coal based energy comes from “technological dinosaurs built in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.”
An integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC), which uses chemical reactions to separate the constituent parts of liquefied coal, is an even more advanced and much cleaner technology. Gellici continued: “There is the Tampa IGCC plant in Polk, Florida, and the Wabash River plant in Indiana. But for these new plants, public utility commissions have being denying permits. They can’t justify new power plants because it’s not the least cost option. When they do get the permits, IGCC plants get shut down by the environmental community because of their objection to building any new coal plants.”
The process used by the Tampa and the Wabash River IGCC plants involves pumping coal mixed with water into a superheated oxygen chamber that separates the coal into its constituent parts. The resulting liquids and gases are then put through filtering processes to remove sulfur, particulate matter, and nitrates. Next, the syngas is ignited to turn the turbine—the first cycle in a combined-cycle system. Finally, the exhaust gas is used to heat water into steam, which turns a second turbine. Burning the liquid at such high temperatures consolidates the CO2, which makes it easy to capture. However, because carbon cap and trade systems have yet to be put in place, these IGCC plants pump easily capturable CO2 into the atmosphere.
These two plants were constructed as pilot facilities for IGCC technology and subsidized by the federal government. The Polk Power Station has been running commercially since 1996, and the Wabash River Station has been producing electricity since 1995, a wise investment since the older broilers at the power plant were ordered to be shut down in May 2009 due to violations of the Clean Air Act. Tampa Electric, the company that owns the Polk plant, has been able to derive profit not only from the electricity, which due to 15 percent more efficiency is cheaper to generate, but also from the captured pollutants by selling sulfur to fertilizer companies and slag to the cement industry. As of 2007, 159 new coal-fired plants are in the planning process, but only nine of these will employ IGCC technology because these plants cost one billion dollars apiece to build, which is 15 to 20 percent higher than the cost of a traditional coal burning plant. In order to encourage companies to invest in IGCC and carbon capture sequestration (CCS), the DOE is planning to construct FutureGen, a plant that will combine both of these technologies.
Although the coal industry is quick to adopt “clean coal” rhetoric, the few utility companies willing to actually invest in cleaner technologies is evidence of the industry’s tendency to cling to old, destructive practices until forced to comply by federal legislation. CCS, for example, is much easier to implement at an IGCC plant than at a traditional pulverized coal station. Choosing to stick with tradition, in this case, is a bad investment in the future on more than one front. Even if not initiated by the Obama administration, a legislated carbon cap is still inevitable, which will make pumping CO2 into the atmosphere a costly business. Likely, the energy companies building traditional coal burning plants plan to look for loopholes as they did when the government passed the Clean Air Act, thus allowing so many grandfathered plants (like the Potomac River Generating Station) to stay in operation. But as Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson asserts: “the lifestyles that produce greenhouse gases are deeply ingrained in modern economies and societies.” All the coal industry has to do is threaten a blackout, and critics back off.
Throughout our interview, Gellici had maintained a comfortable and easy manner. Her voice contained no element of defensiveness, despite the fact that she was representing an industry facing significant criticism. When mentioning the possibility of an energy crisis, she transitioned amiably: “The NERC [North American Electric Reliability Corporation] did an electrical assessment, and in 2009, some states won’t have enough of an energy margin, falling short by 8 to 9 percent. In the future, there will be more plasma screens, more hybrids, more plug-in vehicles. In Italy, citizens have marched out on the streets because of their utility bills. Germany is part of the Kyoto agreement, but can’t keep its commitment and is building new coal plants. China surpassed us in emissions last year. CO2 emission reductions need to be a global commitment.”
Gellici ended with a statement that embodies the energy conundrum. “It’s like the sign in my car mechanic’s shop: ‘We can do this cheaply, quickly, or right. Choose two.’” In order to prevent global calamity, “quickly” may not be negotiable. According to John Holdren, professor of environmental policy at Harvard University: “If all the coal-burning power plants that are scheduled to be built over the next twenty-five years are built, the lifetime carbon dioxide emissions from those power plants will equal all the emissions from coal burning in all of human history to date.” China erects approximately one power plant a week and is expected to construct 562 new plants between 2006 and 2014.
In the lobby of the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) office of Washington D.C. hangs a poster: “Some mistakes are no big deal. Global warming isn’t one of them.” According to its website, the NRDC is the “nation’s most effective environmental action organization.” Founded in 1970 by law students and attorneys, the NRDC employs the expertise of three hundred science, law, and policy experts and the grassroots support of 1.2 million members to protect the natural environment and the creatures that live within in it. They are at the forefront of the energy debate, attempting to combat global warming and help America move beyond fossil fuels. Jim Presswood, the agency’s federal energy policy specialist, grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. He spent his summers at his grandparents’ cabin in the Smoky Mountains, where he developed the love of nature that finally propelled him into the national arena. Initially a public policy major, his particular interest in air quality began as a college senior, when he waited at a traffic light behind an old pickup truck that spewed thick smoke out its exhaust pipe. Accordingly, Presswood holds a very different view on coal than Janet Gellici: “We do not support additional coal generation. Other forms of energy are sufficient to meet our resource needs, but if coal needs to be deployed, we think that it should be IGCC with carbon sequestration technology disposal. People kind of think of the NRDC as pro-coal, but we’re not. We recognize the political realities of China going gangbusters to develop its coal industry. Our coal lobby has a really strong influence in Congress, and we recognize that there’s going to be a least a $100 million budget for carbon capture plants to be built. We tacitly oppose conventional pulverized coal technology, no questions asked. They do not belong in a carbon constrained world where we have to meet increasingly aggressive reduction targets. We think ultimately efficiency and renewables will win out. They’ll be able to beat the socks off coal on a cost basis. If you internalize carbon costs, you level the playing field like it should be. It’s all about internalizing externalities.”
When Presswood mentioned internalizing coal costs, he meant the cost coal has on our society that is currently being absorbed by taxpayers. This includes the health care expense of black lung, which claims one thousand miners a year, and air pollution, which claims 2,400 people, and then the medical bills of those living near coal mines and cleaning facilities that are poisoned by their operations. Added to this is the price of injury and death incurred by miners and the tax dollars supporting the budget of the Mine Health and Safety Association, an agency whose sole responsibility is to prevent such accidents. A third element would be the amount required to reclaim the 12,204 abandoned mines documented by the Bureau of Land Management and clean up the damage created by flooding and coal sludge spillage in areas such as Buffalo Creek, Pittston, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Finally, this would include the cost of cleaning all the waterways in America that have been polluted by mining—all in all—a cost almost innumerable.
Presswood’s opinion reflects the consensus among many environmentalists. James Hansen, director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a leading climatologist, asserted before a crowd in D.C.: “Until we have that clean-coal power plant, we should not be building them. It is clear as a bell.” He summed up his discourse with the radical suggestion that by 2050 any “dinosaur” plants that aren’t capturing CO2 should be bulldozed. According to climate scientists, safe CO2 levels that would help prevent violent climate changes should be somewhere under 450 parts per billion. Maintaining this level would not only require quick and efficient adoption of clean coal technologies, but also improvements in energy efficiency and renewable generation.
Any action that is effective and rapid is going to cost money. When I asked Presswood which technologies he felt were worth the investment, he indicated that he favored a varied portfolio: “In order to achieve reduction of global warming pollution in a way that is cost effective, we really need to incentivize energy technology. We need to have the incentives structured in a way that they’re based upon performance. You don’t want to pick technologies; let the best technology win.”
Wind is the fastest growing alternative energy source and presently constitutes 5 percent of the energy grid. Prices for wind generated electricity are already competitive with natural gas and are likely to continue to decrease. Wind’s primary drawback is its intermittency. Although turbines can’t provide a steady supply to meet demand as easily as coal fired power plants, recent storage technologies enable wind power to be a more consistent source of energy. Night is the generation peak for wind plants, and energy not needed for the grid is used to heat liquid, which can be used later to heat water to generate steam. This way, during periods of lower generation, wind energy can be supplemented with steam power. It is anticipated that wind may be able to carry 20 percent of the nation’s power needs by 2020 to 2040.
In 2009, solar energy powered .5 percent of the grid, and many are hopeful its price will be competitive with natural gas and wind in five to ten years. According to some scientists, concentrated solar power (CSP) systems can be developed to carry a more significant portion of the power grid. Charles E. Andraka of Sandia National Laboratories asserted before the Senate in 2006: “The Southwest US has an incredible resource. We like to call this ‘the Saudi Arabia of solar energy.’” To date, CSP researchers have identified easily reachable sources of seven terawatts of generating capacity, which is seven times the current electricity-generating capacity of the United States. CSP is a fairly simple technology, using mirrors to concentrate sunlight and use its heat to drive turbine engines. This process is incredibly efficient, with 31 percent of the collected solar energy being converted into power. It also has some advantages over wind power. It’s more easily stored and doesn’t require batteries, enabling it to meet peak demand periods on the grid. Potential disadvantages to CSP include the initial costs of building the plants, property taxes associated with the use of the land, and the length of the transmission lines. Most of our solar resources are located in the desert, far from energy users and cities.
Like Gellici, Presswood foresees an electrification of the transportation industry and an increase in hybrid vehicles. Where Gellici would advocate syngas, Presswood supports the extended use of biofuels. In the United States, ethanol is produced primarily from corn grown in the Midwest. Currently all vehicles can run on gases that contain 10 percent ethanol, and vehicles that run on diesel can accommodate up to 85 percent ethanol. Concerns over ethanol deal with the amount of energy that is used to grow the biomass and subsequently convert it into a source of power. Ethanol also contains less energy per mile than oil, which raises fuel costs for consumers. From environmental and geopolitical standpoints, ethanol reduces America’s reliance on foreign energy sources, replacing them with a gas that burns cleanly and is renewable. From an economic standpoint, ethanol also brings jobs to rural communities.
Among the technologies Presswood champions is the often ignored energy efficiency: “Energy conservation is flipping on and off the lights, but efficiency is getting the same amount of work, but using less energy. Buildings can reduce energy consumption by 30 percent, and that adds up to a lot of emission reductions.” The idea of energy efficiency was first tossed around in the early seventies after the 1973 oil crisis, but it hasn’t been until recently that governments, businesses, and individuals have looked into this largely untapped energy resource.
Energy Star is a project founded jointly by the EPA and DOE to help Americans conserve both energy and money. In 1992, the Energy Star label was introduced on computers, and now the label is available on home electronics, major appliances, office equipment, lighting, homes, and commercial buildings, certifying energy efficiency. In 2008, Energy Star helped Americans avoid the equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions from twenty-nine million cars and save nineteen million dollars on utility bills. Amory Lovins, the Rocky Mountain Institute’s cofounder, chairman, and chief scientist, is an efficiency guru who has designed energy saving alterations for cars, trains, factories, and housing. He believes half of current oil use can be offset with efficiency, which he defines as “wringing more work out of our kilowatt/hour by substituting technology and brains for fuel and money.” He also notes that “efficiency is arguably the highest return/lowest risk investment in the whole economy.” It has been asserted that up to 75 percent of US electricity needs could be saved with innovations to enhance efficiency, which could also keep growth in the global demand for energy at less than 1 percent per year.
According to Presswood, legislation plays a strong role in implementing these new technologies. “Having an energy resource standard would be key. Renewable production standards goals would be key. But of course the first, fourth, fifth priority would be getting a cap and trade system in place. If you have the right price in the wrong market, it’s going to be really difficult to get any of these technologies up and rolling. Our goal is to reduce carbon emissions going into the atmosphere, which is just something that we have to get under control.”
Voices like Phil Smith’s, Janet Gellici’s, and Jim Presswood’s collide in a national debate that will ultimately decide the energy future of America, but I wanted to get an opinion from the scientific sector—the researchers that add fuel to the fire. Greg Jackson is the acting director of the University of the Maryland’s Energy Research Center and has conducted extensive research into fuel cell technology. I interviewed him in the top story of the Engineering Department, a floor that perches like at attic over the rest of the building, accessible by climbing four staircases. He was thin, balding, and birdlike, nesting in an office that simultaneously suggested “science guy” and “environmentalist.”
Like Gellici and Presswood, Jackson anticipates a future where the electricity and transportation industries converge. His possible solution for stationary power is one that has been shunned for most of recent history by the environmental community: “We have the potential to increase our nuclear capacity, not quickly, but we have the resources to do it, and maybe not the political will, but with global warming becoming more and more important that political will is going to slowly show. The further we get from Three Mile Island and the misrepresentation of what happened there, society will find it more acceptable. The question with nuclear power is how we deal with the waste. Nuclear is good, but it’s clearly not the catch-all answer.”
In 2009, nuclear fission powered 19 percent of the grid. A technology pioneered in the 1950s, nuclear power was considered the fuel of the future until fossil fuel costs went down in 1970 and concerns rose over the disposal of processed uranium. Building a nuclear power plant is significantly more expensive than building a coal fired plant, requiring utility companies go heavily into debt with the hope of recouping their investment from future electricity generation. The switch back to coal intensified when the construction of new nuclear power plants came to a complete standstill in 1979 after the partial meltdown of one of the reactors at the Three Mile Island plant. Little toxic material escaped, and subsequent epidemiological studies have confirmed that the incident had no impact on local incidence of cancer, but the public hysteria created by the accident sealed nuclear power’s unpopularity in the United States. But, as Greg mentioned, in the wake of global warming concerns, nuclear power has a shot at comeback.
Jim Presswood’s point of view on nuclear reflects society’s hesitation: “As soon as they take care of storage costs and the environmental issues associated with storage, the operation risks, and the economics, yes, we’re open to nuclear. We just haven’t seen technology yet that avoids all those very real problems. Each technology carries risks, but the risk of nuclear technology is relatively high.” Patrick Moore, an environmentalist who helped Greenpeace in the 1970s, disagrees. He feels that Three Mile Island, the sole—and nonfatal—accident in the history of US nuclear power generation, was a success story because the concrete containment bulwark prevented the radiation from escaping into the surrounding environment. According to Moore, “Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce … emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power … Today there are 103 nuclear reactors quietly delivering just 20 percent of America’s electricity. Eighty percent of the people living within ten miles of these plants approve of them. Although I don’t live near a nuclear plant, I am now squarely in their camp.” Uranium still contains about 95 percent of its energy after the first cycle, and it can be reprocessed, reducing wastes. Japan, France, Britain, and Russia all recycle uranium, and this technology is currently being considered in the United States.
But nuclear, according to Jackson, would not be the ultimate destiny of energy: “I think the end goal is clearly to move to sustainable energy production with solar and wind, and at least the hydroelectric that we have. The challenge is that takes up a lot of land, and it’s not environmentally perfect because there’s loss of agriculture and loss of forests, and you don’t want to do that. In other parts of the world they’re chopping down forests, so they can grow biomass for making ethanol. It makes sense for profit—it doesn’t make sense for global warming.”
Jackson continued by explaining how the power-generating capabilities of wind and solar are yet to be seen, and even these have their problems: “Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing for a big solar farm out in the Mojave Desert, and environmentalists are against it, and understandably because they’re worried about habitat. They have their point. It’s ironic, though, that the people that are against installing solar are the environmentalists.” To this point in our interview, Jackson’s responses had reflected the opinions common to many environmentalists. His next argument revealed the scientist and innovator: “One thing that isn’t getting a lot of press right now, but is certainly possible, is if we boost our electricity grid, you can actually make fuels by using electricity to split water and carbon dioxide back into fuels. If you’re making your energy cleanly, nuclear and renewable, and you have excess, you can use some of that excess to make hydrogen cells. The thing about renewable energy is it’s not consistent. If you rely on it, you want to make all the power when you can. How do you store it? Batteries are environmentally disastrous, too. The only way to store it is to use the excess to make fuel, so you’re storing your excess energy in chemical bonds, which you’ll use for airplanes or trucks, and for cars if we are still using fuel-based cars. If we could get to a hydrogen-based infrastructure, it would be wonderful.”
Hydrogen fuel cell technology extracts the energy stored in the cellular bonds of hydrogen, separating the protons and electrons. These atomic particles then combine with oxygen to produce the only byproduct of the process, water. The main problem with hydrogen fuel cells to date is cost.
When I asked Jackson which of all energies is worth investing in, he mentioned geothermal. This will happen “when it’s economically viable,” he believes. “It’s expensive to start, but once you get it going, it’s pretty easy to operate. Drilling these small holes deep into the earth is very capital intensive. The reason that nobody builds them is nobody wants to put up the investment.”
Geothermal is a little talked about technology that has the potential of carrying a significant portion of the power grid. Under the earth’s surface lie areas with elevated temperatures near enough to the crust that the heat generated by magma or plate tectonics can be harnessed to heat water and create steam. This steam, consistent with conventional energy-generation processes, turns turbines. As of 2010, there were nine states with geothermal power plants—Alaska, California, Hawaii, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming—and several others have known geothermal resources. The estimated number of undiscovered geothermal resources is more than four times those currently identified in the United States. There is also the possibility of drilling in permeable rock to reach heat sufficient to generate 517,800 megawatts of electricity, which, at current usage, is enough to power half of the electrical grid. The cost of drilling these holes can be prohibitive, but on the whole geothermal is much more cost effective than IGCC plants and carbon capture technology.
Jackson, like everybody before him, had something to say about coal: “We have a lot of coal, and there’s too much industry invested in coal power for that to just go away as much as, personally, I would like it to go away. I just don’t like the way coal mining is destructive, and particularly the way it’s done in West Virginia. I’m not thrilled about carbon sequestration because it relies too much on very good execution and accountability. I have colleagues who are adamantly opposed to it because they are afraid that the carbon dioxide will burp. I actually think you can minimize that risk. Carbon dioxide is a heavy gas. It likes to stick to minerals. I think you could easily store it underground.”
The stock example for carbon burping is Lake Nyos in Cameroon, where a sudden release of volcanic CO2 in 1986 asphyxiated 1,700 villagers as well as their livestock, a scenario that carbon sequestration advocates consider highly unlikely to occur again.
No matter what energy sources we invest in, Jackson asserts: “Conservation has to be a part of the equation. You can’t force people with conservation. I work in a center for environmental energy engineering, and I see regularly a lack of will to recycle among the students, and we talk about these things. You ask yourself, if we can’t get them to do, who can we get to do it? I think the only way is to tie it into money. We have to pay for energy. That’s when society seems to move.”
As a scientist, Jackson spoke mostly of solutions, but he ended with a statement that left me slightly chilled: “The transition, whatever we do, will be long, and it makes me very nervous. I agree with the International Panel on Climate Control that we’re at a dangerous point. If we don’t take action soon, from a climate perspective, we’ll be at a point where we just can’t adapt. We’re not going to stop the problem, and maybe we’re there already, and unfortunately this transition is going to be long, and that makes me nervous for my kids. Once you stress a world like that, injustices get amplified.”