Green Options

Hyperion Power Generation issued a press release on August 12, 2008 announcing that their first customer had signed a letter of intent (LOI) to purchase 6 Hyperion Power ModulesTM (HPM), which the company describes as “a small, compact, transportable, nuclear power reactor”.

Each HPM will be priced at approximately $25 million. The company did not disclose an expected shipping date for the first HPM, but the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission currently lists their scheduled manufacturing license review as starting in 2012 with an projected completion sometime in 2015. (Ref - Periodic Briefing on New Reactor Issues dated February 20, 2008 - PDF.)

Each year, US nuclear power plants prevent 700 million tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. In order to equal that achievement by reducing emissions from personal automobiles, the owners of 96% of the cars on the road today would have to agree to never drive again. Why then, are so many people in the “Environmental Movement” so firm in their opposition to nuclear power?

One of Al Gore’s frequently used sound bites to explain his skepticism about the potential for nuclear power to address energy and climate change challenges is that the plants come in only one size - “extra large”. The last time I heard him say those words was during an interview by Katie Couric just a couple of weeks ago.

Web denizens, Navy submariners, former Army Nukes, and others have always recognized that the former Vice President’s comment does not provide a full picture of the possibilities. While it is certainly true that vendors like GE, Areva, Rosatom, Siemens, and Mitsubishi have chosen to limit their model line-up to the very largest plants, the technical fact is that nuclear reactors have always been available in multiple sizes ranging from petite to XXL.

People who do not work for ADM, Deere, Cargill and Monsanto recognize that the rapidly growing corn ethanol industry is causing some unintended consequences. There has been a “corn rush” with rising prices for land, an increased demand for fertilizers, reduction in crop rotation schemes, and production cost increases for a wide array of food items. The breadth of the impact on food prices has surprised some people because there is not always a first order connection to corn, but the competition for land and fertilizers can bleed into a diverse range of crops and meat products.

Corn ethanol is also causing some very interesting political discussions that result in strange bedfellow alliances on all sides of the argument. Conservative and liberal labels have no real meaning in this discussion; even regional boundaries are being made fuzzy by the varying impacts of the market changes.

My name is Rod Adams. I am addicted to my fossil fuel powered vehicles. (The accompanying photo was taken in July 1986.)

I thought it might be worth taking a few minutes to remember that people who developed internal combustion engines were not people focused on selling fossil fuels, they were people interested in solving a very real challenge - energy storage and delivery on a moving vehicle. When all factors are taken into account, fossil fuels provide a compact, lightweight form of energy that can be readily converted to power in device that is moving - sometimes very rapidly and without any connection to the earth.

There are certainly times in all of our lives when we feel like the big oil companies have us over a barrel, but their dominance came as a result of the high performance that their product gave to automobiles, trains, trucks, ships and aircraft. By many measures, their product remains the best technical choice available.

It has been a big week for energy plans. All of the plans envision a need for more abundant and reliable electrical power, but all of the plans marginalize the potential for growth in nuclear fission power.

One of the reasons that I am so enthusiastic about nuclear fission technology is that it provides humans with the ability to accomplish tasks that would be impossible with any other power source.

As a former submarine engineer, I never fail to marvel at the fact that a volume of fuel small enough to fit under my office desk could power a ship for 15-30 years without even taking a breath. Trying to compare nuclear capabilities with wind or solar power is like trying to compare Michael Jordan in his prime to a bench warmer on an elementary school basketball team.

One of the frequently repeated canons in the anti-nuclear catechism is that nuclear fission is irrelevant to any discussion about oil supplies or oil prices. The offered reasons for that dismissal is that nuclear fission is generally thought to be limited to large scale electrical power production, and oil is generally used as vehicle fuel. The problem with that notion is that it misses a huge, historical trend, and it also ignores the market reality in several remaining locations.

The US Energy Information Agency does a fine job of keeping statistical records of energy sources - though its predictive arm has had some real miscues over the years. The graph associated with this article provides a picture illustrates that the use of oil for electricity in the US may be small now, but that is because it was replaced by nuclear fission during the growth years in the 1970s and 1980s.

T. Boone Pickens has captured America’s attention with his PickensPlan for energy. He recently testified in front of the US Senate and provided them with some excellent information about oil and gas depletion, asked repeatedly for them to continue supplying the Production Tax Credit (PTC) and described how there were perfectly located corridors in the US that were the “Saudia Arabia” of wind.

He has been running advertisements on major media outlets describing a clear challenge - America now sends $700 Billion across its borders every year to purchase oil.

Pickens has a plan to reduce that number and he intends to share the details of the plan during the coming weeks. He has been an oilman all his life; that has made him a strong believer in Peak Oil.

Does the creation of the interstate highway system provide a better model for addressing energy issues than the Apollo or Manhattan projects?