Green Options

If you listen to the McCain campaign, nuclear power is a key solution to our energy dependence and global warming woes. Remove a few regulations here, provide some tax credits there, and poof! — energy independence, clean power and new jobs flow forth like oil through a pipeline.

There is a growing recognition that a world based on ever increasing consumption of fossil fuels is a world of constrained human development. Some people think that is a good thing, I tend toward the view that people have a lot of room for improvement and growth. We could use a new basis on which to build the devices that we will use to provide choices for our personal environment, to take us places where we want to go, and to make the goods that enable us to survive no matter what the weather brings.

My contention is that such a discovery has already been made, and that there is a growing recognition of the potential for that basis to expand the boundaries of our growth, creativity and development. The uranium oxide fuel pellet - that tiny black cylinder shown in the photo next to one of my favorite coffee mugs - is made of material with incredible potential compared to the fossil fuels that supply the heat that we use for the vast majority of our controllable power. I like to think of these tiny pellets as equivalent to early stage transistors at the time when most of the system controllers, radios, televisions, and computers in the world depended on magnetic amplifiers or vacuum tubes.

Last night I had the opportunity to talk with Bonne Posma, a serial entrepreneur whose most recent company is called Liquid Coal, Inc. He sees a great opportunity for making the world a safer and cleaner place by developing a process that will use heat from high temperature nuclear reactors as part of a process of converting coal into a liquid hydrocarbon.

Bonne is standing on the shoulders of many other engineers and scientists in his efforts. The chemistry required to convert coal, which is mostly carbon and hydrogen, into a liquid hydrocarbon was developed in the 1920s by a German team of Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch. The Fisher-Tropsch process has a rather uncomfortable history - it’s most prominent use has been by Germany during WWII and by South Africa during the apartheid era.