Terrestrial Energy by William Tucker

William Tucker has written about environment and energy issues for twenty-five years. His work has appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New Republic, Reader's Digest, Life, Reason, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Terrestrial Energy will be his fourth book. From Bill Tucker's Blog: Hi, I’m Bill Tucker, author of the forthcoming book, Terrestrial Energy, and operator of this website. As you can see, it’s about nuclear energy, global warming and the threat to the environment. The theme of my book is that nuclear power is the only technology that’s ever going to make an impact in cutting carbon emissions and heading off global warming. Anyone who understands physics knows this is true. The quantities of energy we need to run our society just aren’t available from what we’re calling the “clean alternatives.” Solar energy in its various manifestations are incredibly dilute and takes an incredible amount of effort to gather and distribute. It’s “environmental footprint” is gargantuan - that’s the best word I can come up with. Think of Lake Powell backed up behind Hoover Dam in Nevada. It produces 2000 megawatts (MW), which is about one-third more than the largest nuclear plant. The nuke can sit on an industrial park about about two square miles. I just finished reading a fairly famous paper by Jesse Ausubel, of Rockefeller University, “Renewable and Nuclear Heresies.” http://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/HeresiesFinal.pdf. He makes another analogy in there. If you were to burn trees to produce as much power as one nuclear plant, you would need a forest of one thousand square miles. People have trouble grasping this. In fact it’s one of the themes of my book. The secret of understanding nuclear is in Einstein’s formula, E=mc2. (Sorry, no superscript in this format.) That says we derive energy by turning matter into energy. (You can also turn energy into matter, but that’s something only God has been able to do so far.) When we burn coal, we’re transforming very, very infinitesimal amounts of matter in the electron orbits into energy, or at least releasing it from where it’s been stored. The point is this. The structure of the atom is that 99.99 percent of the matter is in the nucleus. The protons and neutrons weight about 2 million times more than the electrons, which are virtually weightless. Therefore the energy release from transformations in the nucleus are about 2 million times greater than what we can get from “chemical” changes in burning coal or oil. (The energy that comes from turning a windmill or a tapping a waterfall is orders of magnitude less than that. They’re not even chemical energy but kinetic energy, the weakest kind.) That’s why you have these juxtapositions: two square miles for nuclear reactor versus one thousands square miles for “biofuels.” Coal throws off 3 billions tons of carbon dioxide a year in America, nuclear zero. Of course, there’s the “nuclear waste,” which is highly radioactive, but that’s completely misunderstood. That radioactivity is only more energy. We could tap it - and nations such as France and Japan, which are now way ahead of us on nuclear, already do. The reason spent nuclear fuel is so radioactive is because there’s so much energy left in it. Some radioactive by-products are useful as fuel or industrial and medical isotopes. The remaining material - only 3 percent of the fuel rod - can be safely stored until its radioactivity subsides or until it becomes useful to recycle for other purposes. There is no such thing as "nuclear waste." That’s a lot of information and I’d much prefer you explore these issues through the site, which we’ve tried to set up to make it accessible. I’ve called nuclear energy “terrestrial energy” because that’s what it is. It’s energy stored in the earth. The interior of the earth is heated to a temperature of 7000 degrees Fahrenheit by the breakdown of uranium and thorium in the mantle. That’s hotter than the surface of the sun. We can tap this as “geothermal energy,” but the much easier strategy is to mine a little bit of the source of this energy - the uranium - and duplicate the process, accelerating it a little, in a “nuclear reactor.” Terrestrial energy is perfectly natural. it’s no different than digging up the stored solar energy in coal - and a lot, lot cleaner. It’s environmentally benign, not nearly as dangerous as people suppose, and has the potential to save the planet from all kinds of degradation caused by less concentrated and messier forms of stored energy. As Ausubel says, “Nuclear is green.” I’d like to ask you help in conveying this message. We're having a little difficulty coming up with a subtitle for this book. The possibilities are: Terrestrial Energy: How a Nuclear-Solar Alliance Can Rescue the Planet Terrestrial Energy: Why Nuclear is Green and How It Can Rescue the Planet Terrestrial Energy: Why Nuclear is Green and Should Be Part of Our Energy Mix Take a vote on the site (when we get it set up) or just send an email. Thanks. I started out to inaugurate the real purpose of this blog - chronicling the many, many instances in the press and on the Internet where seemingly intelligent and knowledgeable people say incredibly uninformed things about nuclear power. There’s a huge bifurcation in American society. We have a core of people who understand nuclear technology, who recognize its world-saving potential, but who simply can’t communicate this to the general public - and are getting kind of bitter about it as well. Then we have the general public that yearns for something exactly like nuclear - “clean energy” - but is totally misinformed about it and therefore fearful. If you take the time and patience to explain nuclear to people, they almost always understand. But it’s difficult and you have to get their attention. Blogging is writing to its core. I’ve been writing for 25 years but I’ve never done anything like this - pure public declamation where you have to be brief, concise and comprehensible or people will roll their eyes, get bored, and go off somewhere else. If you’ve read this far then I guess I’ve got your attention, so please feel free to post as much as you like. I’m desperate for suggestions. And I’ll be back soon to list some of those ridiculous instances where even the most sophisticated people (Al Gore, for instance) don’t seem to understand nuclear energy.