DoE, Please Help Save the World
Dear Energy Secretary Dr. Ernest J. Moniz,
We are facing extreme and costly environmental threats from global warming and sea level rise. In addition, our carbon dioxide emissions have rendered the oceans more acidic than at any time in the last 300 million years, threatening the natural carbon cycle and oceanic food chains upon which we depend for about 20% of our food protein. I’m sure you’re familiar with the bleak scenarios likely to unfold if the energy sector continues with business as usual. When will the Department of Energy quit tolerating business as usual and start getting serious about averting this impending chain of catastrophes?
There is so much DOE can do. For one thing there are methods of generating nuclear power more cheaply than fossil fuel power, using fluid fuels and non-aqueous coolants. One way was studied at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s (Alvin Weinberg’s Molten Salt Reactor Experiment), but that work ended for political rather than technical reasons and ORNL was pushed aside. If ORNL had been funded to scale up its successful test reactors to commercial size, coal burning for electricity would have ended by 2000, before global warming became the existential concern it is today.
Now that CO2 emissions are threatening the environment and civilization itself, why doesn’t DOE restart ORNL’s Generation-IV molten salt reactor R&D program? The Chinese are doing this, and we should too, unless we want American utilities to buy their advanced reactors fromChina
Sincerely,
MAP
We are facing extreme and costly environmental threats from global warming and sea level rise. In addition, our carbon dioxide emissions have rendered the oceans more acidic than at any time in the last 300 million years, threatening the natural carbon cycle and oceanic food chains upon which we depend for about 20% of our food protein. I’m sure you’re familiar with the bleak scenarios likely to unfold if the energy sector continues with business as usual. When will the Department of Energy quit tolerating business as usual and start getting serious about averting this impending chain of catastrophes?
There is so much DOE can do. For one thing there are methods of generating nuclear power more cheaply than fossil fuel power, using fluid fuels and non-aqueous coolants. One way was studied at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s (Alvin Weinberg’s Molten Salt Reactor Experiment), but that work ended for political rather than technical reasons and ORNL was pushed aside. If ORNL had been funded to scale up its successful test reactors to commercial size, coal burning for electricity would have ended by 2000, before global warming became the existential concern it is today.
Now that CO2 emissions are threatening the environment and civilization itself, why doesn’t DOE restart ORNL’s Generation-IV molten salt reactor R&D program? The Chinese are doing this, and we should too, unless we want American utilities to buy their advanced reactors from
Sincerely,
MAP
posted by Michael Pelizzari at 9:11 AM
0 comments
