Nuclear Fission: Bridge to Fusion Power
The next President of the United States will be
confronted with the greatest energy crisis yet seen.
This time, it will not be the result of a shutoff in
oil supplies, nor supposed threats to the supply of
this so-called strategic commodity which helped
motivate last year's genocide against Iraq. This time,
it will be the result of the insanity of the national
energy policy which we have tolerated since the early
1970s. The crisis is scheduled to erupt as a breakdown
of what used to be the world's most productive and
cheapest electricity generating system. For that we
have only ourselves to blame.
The energy crisis could erupt as early as the
first half of the next President's term in office.
Lyndon LaRouche is the only candidate with the
qualifications to deal with it. If voters had not
ignored the energy policy platform he put before the
country in 1980, and again in 1984, we would not now be
facing the crisis which is looming ahead. Even as late
as 1988, LaRouche's policy, if it had been adopted,
could have helped avert what is now becoming all but
inevitable.
- Three Aspects of the Crisis -
There are three aspects of the new energy crisis:
{1. National Science Policy.} The question
here is whether the nation is prepared to rebuild its
dismantled scientific and engineering capacity to the
end of realizing the potentials of controlled
thermonuclear fusion power. Using sea water as its
resource for the fusion of hydrogen and deuterium,
fusion power will bring the energy source of the stars
down to Earth, for a cheap, virtually inexhaustible
energy source.
{2. The Role of Nuclear Fission}. Can
Americans muster sufficient rationality to accept the
scientific fact that nuclear energy is our only means
to reverse the depression collapse at home and end the
genocide against the Third World? Without a commitment
to rebuilding the nuclear industry as rapidly as
possible, there will be no future, either for the
United States, or for the rest of the world.
What is needed is the establishment of an industry
for the mass production of modular nuclear plants, such
as the Modular High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor
(MHTGR) proposed by General Atomics (diagram).
Development of our nuclear fission capabilities will
provide the bridge to the energy source of the 21st
century: nuclear fusion.
{3. Time to Dump Environmentalism}. Will
Americans wake up and realize that the
``environmentalism'' and ``magic of the marketplace''
obsessions of the last years are shameless frauds?
These are the cover stories for the deliberate
deindustrialization of America. In the case of our
energy industry, environmentalism has brought us to the
point at which America's lights are about to go out.
- Blackout -
The energy crisis has been made inevitable by the
refusal to invest in new generating capacity to meet
increasing demand for electricity. It will be
exacerbated as the provisions of the Clean Air Act,
especially as they apply to coal-burning utilities, go
into effect.
Since the mid-1980s, government and utilities have
insisted that demand for electricity has slowed to the
point that capacity planned to come on line by the end
of the decade will suffice. It won't. Their projected
increase in demand, at less than 2% per annum, has been
consistently wrong. Growth reported by the Energy
Information Administration has consistently been nearly
twice what utilities and government have forecast. The
capacity to meet the added demand does not, and will
not, exist.
By the end of the 1980s, the National Electric
Reliability Council (NERC) had estimated that, with
approximately 2% annual growth in demand for
electricity, 200-300 gigawatts of generating capacity
(a gigawatt is approximately enough energy to supply a
city of 1 million people) would have to be added to the
inventory of generating equipment. By the early 1990s,
about 86 gigawatts could be accounted for as planned,
of which 28.7 gigawatts were under construction. These
estimates were intended to assure that there would be
no shortages by the end of the decade. With a 10-year
lead time to complete construction of even a coal-fired
plant, anything not yet under construction will not be
part of the generating grid 10 years from now, unless
policies are changed.
A shortfall in energy supplies will lead to
voltage reductions and power interruptions--Third World
style. Brownouts and blackouts will happen during
extremes of weather--winter cold and summer heat--which
define the peak demand for electricity. Increasingly,
they will become an ever-present fact of life.
The 1991 amendments to the 1972 Clean Air Act,
which will knock out more than 12 gigawatts of
capacity, will make things worse.
The Bush administration proposed in its 1991
National Energy Plan legislation that the reduction of
the growth of energy consumption would provide a
solution to the supply crisis. William Reilly, head of
the Environmental Protection Adminstration, espoused
his ``green lights campaign,'' to have corporate
consumers of electricity commit to ``energy efficient''
forms of lighting to help reduce demand. The Bush crowd
has also proposed to ``deregulate'' the electric
utilities, opening up electricity generation to
manufacturers of generating equipment, windmill owners,
dung-burners and who knows what else, all in the name
of ``increasing competitiveness.''
These are proposals which will kill people--the
old and the sick, the poor and the defenseless--as such
policies have been killing, inside and outside the
United States, for more than a generation. But that is
what they are designed to do.
- Shutting Down the Nuclear Industry -
Since the February 1978 sabotage of Pennsylvania's
Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the pretext which
permitted the green Jimmy Carter to begin the shutdown
of the nation's nuclear industry, enough nuclear-based
electric generating capacity been cancelled to have
averted the crisis now before us. This includes nearly
100 power plants ordered before 1978. (No new nuclear
plant has been ordered since 1978.) But it also
includes the cancellation of 80 coal-fired plants,
destined for operation as ``base-load'' generating
units, that is, units which would have been producing
power 24 hours a day. This has been done in the name of
protecting the environment. It has been enforced by the
financial dictatorship imposed on utilities, since
former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's high
interest rate policy of 1979 plunged U.S. manufacturing
industries, especially capital-goods producing
industries, into a depression from which they have
never recovered.
The eruption of a crisis in the nation's power
supply has been temporarily delayed by the depression.
Back in the 1960s, manufacturing industries used to
account for about half of the nation's electricity
consumption. In the intervening period, manufacturing's
share of electricity consumption has fallen to around
30% of the total. If we still produced the shoes and
the socks and the shirts and pants, as well as the
steel and machinery we need to survive, energy
shortages would have become apparent many years ago.
Until the Carter administration, the growth of
U.S. electrification, doubling every ten years, was
unique in the world. The 1970s broke the pattern, as
growth fell from over 7% per year in the 1960s to
around 3% per year, and since then has collapsed by
half again. The growth of electrification was crucial
to the production of what used to be America's high
standard of living. Since the East Coast blackouts of
1965, when the National Electric Reliability Council
(NERC) was formed, America's regulated electric
utilities were mandated to ensure, as first priority,
reliability of electricity supplies. Now, America's
high living standards have disappeared. The reliability
of electricity supply is about to disappear, too.
The conceit, propagated by Harvard, popularized by
Carter and company, and enforced by the
environmentalists and the Wall Street banks, was that
the link had been broken between growth in energy
supplies, and the growth of the economy as a whole. The
same babble comes from the free-marketeers, who now
boast idiotically of how much they will reduce the
energy content required to increase the GNP by the end
of the century.
Human history proves that this is nonsense.
Current events prove that it is genocidal. Advances in
the human condition {require} advances in the
quality and amount of energy available to power the
machinery on which man's continued existence depends.
Conservation was tried before, by the Roman Emperor
Diocletian, who banned labor-saving devices from his
empire. With the fall of the Roman Empire, the
population of the Mediterranean Basin collapsed by 40%,
just as the populations of the developing sector are
today being murdered by lack of technology. Today, the
environmentalist Clean Air Act bans additions to
power-generating and manufacturing capacity by
``capping'' so-called emissions. Under the act, new
capacity can only be added if old capacity is withdrawn
from service.
This is the prescription for energy crisis now,
and economic disaster a short way down the road. Since
the availability of raw materials is defined by the
science and technology employed to produce raw
materials, any attempt to halt technology ensures that
the economic cost of those raw materials increases as
the resource is depleted. And thus, what is now called
``conservation'' does the reverse of what it claims to
do. A society which seeks to emulate Diocletian's Rome
will destroy the very basis for its own existence, as
the Roman Empire did.
LaRouche's alternative would provide the power
needed to put the country back to work producing what
it needs for itself, and as its contribution to the
well-being of the rest of the world.
----
John Covici
[email protected]
