Home   News   Schools   Sports   Biz   Opinion   Health   Scitech  Arts   Dining   Movies   Outdoors   Weather   Comics   Archives  NM Jobs Cars Real Estate

          Front Page  opinion  guest_columns

Monday, August 04, 2008

Without Nuclear, Alternative Energy Is Tilting at Windmills

By William R. Stratton And Donald F. Peterson
Los Alamos Education Group
          AL GORE AND T. Boone Pickens recently have offered proposals to solve the energy shortfall and climate change. Gore recommends abandoning use of fossil fuels in 10 years. Pickens proposes a combination of wind power for electrical generation and reassignment of natural gas from electric power generation to the mobile economy. ...
        Both proposals aim to substitute other energy production methods for existing fossil-produced energy. Both proposals fail to consider future energy requirements and thus add little to the largely unanticipated doubling to quadrupling of energy demand accompanying population growth in the rest of this century.
        Planners must make decisions now to influence future energy generation methods. ... The time to experiment was squandered by the abdication of nuclear energy leadership in the late '70s. We are 30 years late and many dollars short.
        In 2006, the Energy Information Agency published the total national electrical demand at 580,000 megawatts; about 50 percent comes from coal, 20 percent from natural gas and 20 percent from nuclear power. Natural gas provides a little over 100,000 megawatts.
        Windmills are proposed to provide the power now obtained from natural gas. If each windmill generates three megawatts, over 33,000 windmills would be required to replace natural gas or nuclear power, when the wind is blowing at the correct velocity. The cost per kilowatt is more than what it replaces but not unduly so.
        However, because the operating record for getting electricity from windmills is only a third of the time, three times as many would be needed, still with no assurance of constant, adequate supply.
        Additionally, modification of the electric grid system would be necessary to collect and distribute windmill energy. At two acres per windmill, the footprint would be enormous and the electrical energy would replace only the natural gas-generated power.
        We suspect that utilities are using windmills primarily to satisfy government edicts that place legislative requirements on power generators to use renewable power — wind, solar, biomass, etc. It is much like requiring oil companies to drill for oil where there is none.
        Nuclear energy, not mentioned by Pickens and Gore, is reliable day or night, rain or shine, winter or summer, calm or windy days and has a comparatively tiny footprint. Allowing a few percent for peaking requirements, all coal and natural gas plants could be replaced by about 240 nuclear power stations of 1,500 megawatts each.
        Considering that we constructed over 100 in less that 20 years, making our electrical system nuclear using an approved "cookie cutter" reactor design is a feasible proposition with room to expand. The French have done it successfully.
        We urge Pickens and Gore to pursue this objective instead of more ephemeral solutions.
        The only way we see any short term hope for the Gore/Pickens proposals is if we use Gore's speeches to power Pickens' windmills.