Al Gore testified before the Senate subcommittee on energy last week. It was not a pretty sight to see.
His main theme, of course, was global warming. Many people dispute the former Vice President, tend on this issue or laugh it off at a time when the country is experiencing severe winter weather. But I’m not so sure. No one will really know for another fifty years whether we are really experiencing significant climate change. Meanwhile, it’s tough to say you can keep throwing 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year without having some effect. Although Gore can sound a little alarmist, there is reason for concern.
Where Gore’s knowledge gives out is when he starts talking about solutions, particularly with solar and so-called “renewable” energy versus nuclear power.
Gore began by telling the committee, “There was an article in the January 2008 issue of Scientific American which said that we could take an area 100 miles on a side, fill it with solar collectors, and we could generate all the electricity we need.”
The article, “A Solar Grand Plan,” by Ken Zweibel, James Mason and Vasilis Fthenakis, did not say 100 miles square, which would be 10,000 square miles. (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan) Here’s what it said:
To meet the 2050 projection [of electrical demand], 46,000 square miles of land would be needed for photovoltaic and concentrated solar power installations.
That’s about one-third of New Mexico (121,000 square miles), the fifth largest state.
Moreover, the Scientific American authors readily admitted such a system would require electrical storage. They suggest a network of “vacant underground caverns, abandoned mines, aquifers and depleted natural gas wells” all over the country storing “535 billion cubic feet of storage, with air pressurized at 1,100 pounds per square inch.” That’s about 1/16th of all the natural gas industry’s underground storage reservoirs.
All this, of course, would also require a complete rebuilding of the electrical grid to 765 kilovolts in order to bring remotely generated electricity to populated regions. My guess is that the whole system would cost upward of $5 trillion.
Now here’s what Gore had to say about nuclear. “Senator, I’m not against nuclear power, but I’ve grown skeptical about the degree to which it can expand. Unfortunately, nuclear reactors only come in one size – extra large. They’ve very expensive. The nuclear industry now has zero ability to predict how much these things will cost. Wall Street is showing no interest in investing. Therefore, I think it’s only going to play a very small part.”
Gore has been throwing that “extra large” description around for years without anybody catching him on it. You can build a nuclear reactor to any size. Enrico Fermi’s original “pile” beneath the bleachers at the University of Chicago generated 60 watts. Research reactors generate 5 to 10 megawatts, submarine reactors 30 to 50 MW, the smallest commercial reactors around 300 MW. The Russians are floating 80-MW reactors on barges into Siberian villages to provide electricity. The only reason we build 1,500-MW reactors is because of their thermal efficiency. Coal plants are built to the same size.
In fact, while renewable energy facilities are getting bigger and bigger (125 square miles for a wind farm with 1000 MW of nameplate capacity), nuclear is getting smaller and smaller. In fact, three companies – Toshiba, Hyperion and NuScale – are producing reactors of less than 80 MW that can power a town of 20,000 out of somebody’s basement.
At the end of Gore’s testimony, Senator John Kerry, who chaired the meeting, couldn’t get over that image of the solar collectors running the country. “So all we’d have to do is build a facility 100 miles on a side and we could free ourselves from the fossil fuels,” he said.
No, Senator, we’re only talking about electricity. We could free ourselves from coal and some natural gas. But 60 percent of our fossil fuels still go to other uses, such as transportation.
Nobody bothered to correct him on the error.
February 12th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Send me your email and I’ll send you info on CO2. Since atmospheric effects of CO2 decline logarithmically with increased amounts and 95%+ of the effect happened below 280 ppm, there will be little further affect of more in the atmosphere, except the plants will love it!
TD