Planning for Post-Carbon Energy

In 2007, I set out to come up with a viable plan for post carbon-energy. I believed at that time that it was going to be necessary to reduce world emissions of CO2 by 80%. I was armed with the knowledge that finding a post carbon source for electrical generation and for transportation could eliminate up to 60% of fossil fuel use. I was not sure how much of that could be wrung out of transportation, but I thought that surface land transportation was promising. Brian Wang of Next Big Future had written advocating the electrification of rail transportation, and the elimination of long distance truck shipping. This would eliminate a great deal of fossil fuel use in trains and trucks for long distance transportation. It also struck me that by 2050, 100% of urban auto transportation could be powered by electricity stored in batteries or capacitors. Intra-urban shipping could be handled by battery and/or capacitor powered trucks, with perhaps a rapid recharge system. Long distance overland passenger travel could be handled by high speed electric trains. But longer distance travel was and still is a problem

Secondly there is the question of water based shipping. There did not appear to be a quick solution. Before the 19th century shipping distance shaping was wind powered. While the notion of returning to wind powered shipping is charming, it poses far too many problems to be practical. In fact the only potential power source would be nuclear. Would a nuclear powered shipping fleet work? I really don't know, but Rod Adams knows a great deal more about it than I do, and I get the impression that Rod thinks it would work. Maybe we can get Rod's comment here.

I did not see an easy solution for air travel. My father worked on the concept of a reactor powered aircraft during the early 1950's, but no one who was involved in the project at that time believed that it was going to be practical for nuclear powered aircraft, let alone civilian air passenger craft. The current air industry is dependent on fossil fuel derivatives for power, and there is no easy substitutes for them. Biofuel advocates say that it will solve the problem, but I had and still have reasons for questioning this claim. Bio fuels substitute carbon-based energy from current biological sources for carbon based energy from ancient fossil sources. The economic viability of this project is questionable. The energy economy of the bio fuel project is questionable. Finally there are long term questions about the effect of bio fuel production on soil. All things being considered he bio fuel approach gives us more questions the answers. The future of air transportation in 2050 is thus open to question, and I cannot foresee an easy technological solution.

So technological routes for replacing fossil fuels exist for surface transportation, and possibility for water based transportation, but air transportation is a problem,

When I looked at electrical generation in 2007, I briefly considered renewables. I formulated a few basic questions like, how would you produce electricity when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. Renewables advocates did not offer good answers to these questions. My exploration of the problems of renewable energy since 2007 has continued to yield the same negative conclusions. Renewable energy is unreliable energy. It is expensive to take unreliable renewable energy and transform it into reliable energy. I have explored the costs and will most likely will continue to do so, but in order to provide electricity on demand from renewable sources, we have to be willing to spend more that we currently spend for electricity. This, I felt was not desirable.

Compared to the cost of reliable renewables, nuclear power looked cheap, but still far more expensive than electricity generated from burning coal. There were other problems with nuclear power. It takes a long time to build reactors. Building a conventional reactor is in fact a mammoth construction project that can extend over a period of a decade. It was an open question to me whether enough reactors could be built world wide during the next 40 years to replace all of the carbon energy sources we need to replace.

If reactors could be built in factories, I thought. We could build enough reactors in 40 years to replace 60% to 80% of all CO2 emitting energy sources, but reactors are huge, and could not be transported easily from a factory to a power plant site.

Then I thought of the Molten Salt Reactor project my father had worked on at ORNL from 1950 to 1969. The MSR had a relatively small core, and in fact it was very simple. It could be built in a useful size at factories, transported by truck, rail or barge, and set up virtually anywhere. About that time I first encountered Kirk Sorensen's blog "Energy from Thorium." I though that Kirk was on the right track. And his concept was efficiently flexible to fit with my emerging vision. Kirk favored a thorium fuel cycle approach to which the MSR was admirably suited, and indeed my father had spent a good deal of time researching the chemistry of the thorium fuel cycle. The thorium fuel cycle offered the promise of a sustainable energy source. A source that could easily provide the human inhabitants of the earth all of the energy they needed for the next billion years or so.

The thorium variant of the MSR, which Kirk called the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) was an extraordinarily promising concept. By conventional reactor standards it was very safe. Unlike conventional reactors it produced little or no nuclear waste. Like all reactors, the LFTR presented some proliferation issues, but those issues could be solved to the satisfaction of reasonable people. Finally a factory LFTR could be built at a price that was much lower than the cost of conventional reactors. Finally the LFTR could produce electrical energy more efficiently than conventional reactors. The LFTR was also a much more efficient consumer of nuclear fuel.

Thus the LFTR was potentially a major source of practical post carbon energy, a source which potentially could provide for all of the energy needs demanded by the human population of earth. By late 2007 it had become my intention to tell the LFTR story to anyone who would listen.