Mark remarks:

> Take the $28 million dollar budget for the NREL and award two prizes: a home
>  heating contest for $10 million, an automotive contest for $10 million, and
>  throw in an ecological bonus prize of $8 million. For a lot less work and
>  money, the government could have hundreds of groups working on the problem.
>  Natural selection would give us a better solution than what the NREL would
>  ever give us in the same time frame and money. Instead, GWB adopts 
(another)
>  economic liberal idea by promoting an artificially selected solution to our
>  energy problems.
>  
>  As long as we continue to allow our government to pick the winners ahead of
>  time, we're going to have that "T. Boone Pickens" problem every time - no
>  matter who's in charge.

You may misunderstand the role of government in research. In almost every 
field of endeavor (medicine, space, electronics, internet, etc.), it is the 
government that performs the most basic research at the most fundamental level, 
when it is too risky and too expensive for any single private organization to do 
so. Only after the most promising paths have been explored in this manner do 
private companies begin to enter the field.

As an agency, NREL is and has been for quite some time now actively involved 
in the development of renewable energy sources, principally wind, solar and 
biomass. Some of these research avenues will pay off modestly, some handsomely 
and some will outrightly fail, but that's the nature of research.

However, because of the research that has been conducted for the last 30 
years we're a lot closer now than we were, and quite excitingly, some of this work 
is actually coming to fruition. I've enclosed below a posting of mine that I 
put up on ECOLOG-L ten days ago. If you have the time, follow the Southern 
California Edison/solar links. I think you'll be impressed.

Wirt Atmar

=======================================

Leslie writes:

>  A few  
>  folks, including Jared Diamond, say that environmentalists should now  
>  embrace nuclear energy as it weans us off fossil fuels.

while Josh writes:

> My vote is a Manhattan Project scale Solar Power project in the southwest
> of the USA.  Use huge amounts of solar power to produce hydrogen and
> transport hydrogen using the existing natural gas pipelines.

In this choice, I'm relatively sure that Josh's preference will beat out 
Jared's over the long-term, and perhaps much sooner than that. Nuclear power has 
some very well-known drawbacks that are not readily amelioratable. Among them 
are these:

     o All fission nuclear reactors produce plutonium as a natural byproduct. 
That makes every nuclear reactor a potential weapons factory. India produced 
its first nuclear weapon from the products of a 1950's Canadian reactor 
design, CIRUS, that was purposefully designed to be used by third-world nations:

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS

India's CIRUS reactor has just now been retrofitted to become a 
nuclear-powered desalinization plant, and therein lies the problem. It's nearly impossible 
to say that a reactor is being utilized for solely peaceful purposes or 
surreptiously as part of a weapons program.

Light-water, pressurized reactors are the least dangerous in that regard, but 
they're also among the most expensive to build and operate. Heavy-water 
pressurized reactors are somewhat in between, and fast breeder reactors simply 
present a grave danger to humanity. They produce nearly weapons-grade plutonium as 
their primary byproduct, allowing almost anyone who operates one to create 
nuclear weapons easily. Refining raw uranium isotopically into weapons grade 
material is a tedious task, but segregating newly formed plutonium from an FBR, 
an element that doesn't exist naturally on the surface of the earth, is only a 
matter of chemistry.

     o Even under the most peaceful uses of nuclear power, by-product 
disposal remains an extremely contentious issue, and one we haven't solved here in 
the US. It will only be harder elsewhere.

     o But the most important quality of a nuclear reactor is that if we 
don't build fast-breeder reactors, and if we were to rely on nuclear reactors to 
supply all of the electrical demands of the United States, it's estimated that 
the world only has enough uranium to provide 30 years of production. In the 
nuclear industry, the common saying is "a neutron used is a neutron lost." The 
only mitigation of that loss is to construct FBRs, but they pose a truly 
significant weapons risk, and for that reason, for the most part, the world has 
stopped building them.

Solar, by comparison, is heaven-sent. Literally. It creates no by-products, 
no pollution, no greenhouse gas emissions, it cannot be readily hijacked for 
political purposes, nor is it ever likely to be the basis of a foreign policy 
and the inevitable conflicts that such policies insure. Most importantly, to a 
first-, second- or third-order approximation, it is an inexhaustible source of 
energy.

There are any number of ways that solar energy can be captured, using on-site 
photovoltaics, as "solar power towers" as have been built in Albuquerque and 
in the California desert, or through the use of biomass, but the tack I 
consider the most promising and the most exciting is that that Southern California 
Edison is taking.

This last August, SCE signed an agreement with Stirling Energy Systems of 
Phoenix to build an array of 20,000 solar tracking engines in the California 
desert to produce an electrical production facility for a minimum of 500 MW, with 
an option to extend it to 850 MW. See:

http://www.sce.com/PowerandEnvironment/BetteringEnergyEfficiencyPowerSources/S
olarProject/

or

     http://tinyurl.com/anxpt

The array field will consume 4500 acres of desert. The US DOE estimates that 
all of the energy needs of the United States, for both fixed and mobile use, 
could be met by an array requiring a square area 100 miles on a side (10,000 
sq. mi.). That may initially sound like a lot. It is, after all, an area 2/3rds 
the size of Connecticut, but for reasons of weather, natural disasters and 
vulnerability to attack, such an array would almost certainly be broken up into a 
100 pieces, 10 miles on a side, and distributed throughout the western US, 
where they would hardly be noticed, nor have any significant environmental 
impact.

Let me recommend that you take some time and look the SCE page referenced 
above, and this one as well from Stirling Energy Systems:

     http://www.stirlingenergy.com/whatisastirlingengine.htm

...including the short video at the bottom of the page. What makes this 
system so extremely attractive is its use of the Sterling heat engine, an idea 
invented 200 years ago by a Presbyterian minister when he was 86 years old. A 
Sterling engine has become a an extremely efficient (near the theoretical maximum 
for the Carnot cycle), closed cycle, reciprocating engine, and that 
reciprocation makes the production of alternating electrical current very efficient as 
well. The gasses used inside a Stirling engine never leave the engine. There 
are no exhaust valves that vent high-pressure gasses, as in a gasoline or diesel 
engine, and there are no explosions taking place. Because of this, Stirling 
engines are very quiet. The Stirling cycle uses an external heat source, which 
could be anything from gasoline to solar energy to the heat produced by 
decaying plants. No combustion takes place inside the cylinders of the engine.

If you have the time, listen to this extremely interesting audio interview 
with one of SES's principals:

     http://www.etopiamedia.net/emeenn/audio/robertliden1.0.wma

Robert Liden, the person being interviewed, is one of the good guys, although 
he's doing nothing that any other businessman isn't trying to do: provide the 
most competitive, most efficient product at the lowest possible price that he 
can. Nonetheless, whether by accident or design, he's likely to be one of the 
people who will help change the world.



Finally, Sebastian writes in response to my statement that well-educated, 
urbanized, wealthy populations leave a smaller footprint on the environment than 
do impoverished populations of the same size:

> I'd be interested in knowing what evidence there is to say that poor
> people make a larger, negative, impact on the environment, compared to
> rich people.

My response only requires a thought experiment. The metropolitan New York 
City area contains 19 million people and is the most populous area in North 
America, yet it consumes a surprisingly small area. Even more importantly, you 
don't have to get very far out of the city to get into woodland. There is no 
desolation surrounding the city, nor any sign of an environment greatly stripped of 
life.

Stuart Pimm likes to talk about his visits to the battlefields of the 
American Civil War, and the first thing that struck him is the question, how did they 
kill each other in such large numbers given all of the trees that are there? 
The answer is of course that the trees weren't there at the time. The farms of 
the Shenandoah Valley have disappeared, to have been replaced by a 150 
year-old successional forest, one that is probably still a few hundred years from 
becoming a mature forest again.

Why was this vast area abandoned as farmland? There are undoubtedly a number 
of reasons: soil depletion, the movement of the farms westward, but certainly 
the most important is that farming became increasingly more efficient, more 
mechanized and thus consumed much less area, to the point that now less than 1% 
of the population of the US earns its living farming.

Now consider the alternative. It's my best estimate that there are less than 
1 million people living in the non-urbanized areas of the Amazonian Basin. 
Imagine moving the 19 million people of NYC to the basin and impoverishing them 
to the point that they too must now earn their living through 
subsistence-level, slash-and-burn agriculture. The effect of the few hundred thousand people 
who do currently live in the region and who try to earn their living in this 
manner is that when you fly over the region you're awestruck by the hundreds of 
miles of constant smoke and haze from the burning of the forest.

Now imagine increasing this impoverished Amazonian population 40 times. The 
size of the footprint that such a population would leave on the environment 
would not be a few hundred square miles that NYC consumes, but rather would be 
the total destruction of the basin within a few decades, I suspect. 
Unfortunately, this is the real problem that we're facing. The coming population bulge 
will be composed of almost wholly of the world's poorest populations. The wealthy 
nations of North America, Europe and Asia are now composed of populations 
that aren't even reproducing themselves, primarily because of the economic and 
educational opportunities that are being afforded young women, and as a 
consequence, these highly urbanized, shrinking populations are having an increasingly 
smaller impact on the environment.

Energy usage per capita isn't the core of the problem. We're bright enough to 
work our way through these problems. Rather, it's an exploding population of 
people who don't have any recourse but to severely exploit the meager 
resources they can extract from the environment by traditional means.

Wirt Atmar

=======================================

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