Open Writing

Each time there is a fuel crisis in the US, real or contrived, it sparks a fever of determination to be free of oil. But because the big oil companies have such arcane and secretive ways of doing business, it’s almost impossible to evaluate the true seriousness of the situation, making it difficult to create a cohesive policy. Such was the case in 1973 and ’74, and in 2008.

In 1973, cities were experiencing power brownouts, gas stations ran out of fuel, and motorists were getting in line to pump gas at 4 am. By mid-1974, the situation was back to normal, and the oil companies were being accused of stockpiling and price gouging. Whether or not this was true was clouded by corporate obfuscation.

In 2008, the price of a gallon of gas doubled in the space of a couple of months, and shortages were predicted, though in fact what resulted was a surplus. The oil companies were blamed once again, and for good measure the OPEC oil cartel also took some heat. But in the end, as far as anyone could tell from the outside, the root of the problem seemed to lie in speculation by commodity traders in oil futures.

One thing became clear from this latter experience, which was that the threshold of US drivers’ price tolerance is around $4.00 per gallon, and once reached, resulted in a rapid decline in consumption. Just as rapidly, the price of gas fell by over a dollar per gallon almost overnight, and it has remained at that level or below ever since.

Though it is obvious that oil supplies are finite, accurate estimates of just how long they will last at the forecast rate of consumption are hard to come by. Estimation is made more difficult by significant new oilfield discoveries, and by advances in extraction technology.

Each oil crisis leaves in its wake the ruins of government and private projects to investigate alternative sources of fuel and electric power costing billions of dollars: underground coal gasification, wind and tide generators, bio-fuels, solar power etc, etc, none of which amount to a lasting solution.

Coal gasification has been in the wings since at least the 1950’s; manufacturing a solar cell uses more power than it will generate in its lifetime; no community wants a wind farm blighting its landscape, and effective tidal generation will depend on ways being found to store electricity.

Given that reserves of fossil fuels are finite, coupled with the problem of the atmospheric pollution they create, it is clear that a rational, viable alternative must be adopted. The elephant in the corner in all of the searching is nuclear power generation.

Once seen as the ideal solution, two major emergencies ended that dream. The poster boy of nuclear disasters was the melt down of the Russian reactor in Chernobyl in 1986. Almost as serious, but better contained, was the partial meltdown at the US Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979.

In both cases, investigations showed that equipment failure and inadequate operator training were the root causes of the accidents. The Chernobyl disaster was exacerbated by the Russian government’s attempt to cover up the true seriousness of the situation, and their refusal to accept timely assistance from the west.

Work on nuclear power generation development in the US has been in hiatus since those catastrophes, other than some low level research. No new plants have been commissioned, and some that were almost completed were dismantled. But the failures of the old plants occurred over twenty years ago, and technology in general has advanced by leaps and bounds in that period. And in any event, surely equipment failure and operator training deficiencies aren’t insurmountable problems.

In the US, probably one of the strongest deterrents to revitalizing nuclear engineering is seen as the difficulty in safely disposing of the spent fuel. Billions of dollars have been expended on preparing disposal sites, only to abandon them before they were put into service. The reasons why are not clear. But America is an immense country, many large areas of which are unsuitable for habitation, so how difficult could it be to find appropriate disposal sites?

And then there are the oceans, with deep chasms such as the Marianas Trench; six miles deep, 1,580 miles long, and with a mean width of 43 miles. Surely, with the underwater technology developed for nuclear submarines and submersible robots, these chasms could provide all the safe and non-polluting storage we would ever need, especially if one takes into account that future reactors hold the promise of producing less waste.

It’s ironic that US citizens are more willing to vote money for projects to determine how much water there is on the moon, and whether Mars ever supported life, than they are to finance the development of plentiful and affordable electric power that could beneficially influence the quality of life on earth for everyone.

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