There's a better solution to our energy problems than ethanol. It's called nuclear energy.

The Weekly Standard ^ | 04/28/2008 | William Tucker

[Delacon]

In order to understand the steep rise in world food prices that set off food riots in Haiti last week and toppled the government, you need to travel to Iowa. Right now, we're trying to run our cars on corn ethanol instead of gasoline. As a result, we suddenly find ourselves taking food out of the mouths of children in developing nations. That may sound harsh, but it also happens to be true.

Environmentalists and farm state senators--the great biofuels coalition--of course object. After U.N. officials called for a biofuels moratorium last week, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, called the whole thing "a big joke." "You make ethanol out of corn," he told the New York Times. "I bet if I set a bushel of corn in front of any of those [U.N.] delegates, not one of them would eat it." In a position paper released only a few weeks ago, the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the many environmental organizations that has preached biofuels for decades, continued to insist that, "done right," ethanol can not only replace all our oil by 2050 but also "mitigate dangerous climate change."

Nice try, folks. Maybe U.N. officials don't eat raw corn, but livestock do, and that land could easily be used to grow crops for human consumption. As for the notion that homegrown ethanol can replace more than a tiny fraction of our oil consumption--let alone do anything to ameliorate world carbon emissions--that is an environmental hallucination.

The conceit of biofuels has always been that agricultural resources in this country were unlimited. Haven't we been paying farmers since the 1930s to not grow crops? Why not employ some of that land to help us gain energy independence? If we run out of room, we can always move on to the tropics, right? Let's import ethanol from Brazil.

The Midwest has embraced this vision with a passion. One-third of the American corn crop will be converted to ethanol this year. Farmers are planting corn fencepost to fencepost and bringing new land under cultivation to cash in. The 51-cents-a-gallon federal tax credit assures a market. Ethanol distilleries are sprouting everywhere. Farm towns are revitalizing. The price of farmland is soaring. Presidential nominations turn on who supports ethanol in Iowa. Getting rid of this web of government intervention would now be just about as difficult as repealing farm subsidies in general.

So let's assess the damage. First, although biofuels have been anointed as clean, renewable, and sustainable, there has never been much evidence that they are producing any new energy. Growing crops consumes energy, and since only a small part of the plant--the seed--is distilled into alcohol, there's no guarantee of an energy gain. The most optimistic studies claim only a 25 percent energy profit, and some critics--David Pimentel of Cornell in particular--claim there is actually an energy loss. Suffice it to say, distilling one-third of our corn crop is replacing only 3 percent of our oil consumption.

When the energy independence theory started to falter, environmentalists settled on the notion that at least ethanol would reduce carbon emissions. President George W. Bush reiterated this last week in his address on climate change. If we burn this year's corn crop, so the logic went, we are only putting back atmospheric carbon that was taken out last year. But if we burn coal or oil, we're putting back carbon that has been underground for eons. Therefore biofuels are "carbon neutral."

There is just one question this line of reasoning doesn't answer. What was growing on that acreage before it was turned over to biofuels? If it was another field crop, then the carbon would have remained in the soil or the food supply or any other of the many "carbon sinks" for a long, long time. If it were a forest--particularly a tropical forest, a great natural sink for carbon--then the net addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere could be extraordinary.

This year somebody finally asked the question. In February, Science published an article by a team headed by Joseph Fargione of the Nature Conservancy showing that converting virgin land into ethanol cultivation multiplies carbon emissions by a factor of 93. "So for the next 93 years, you're making climate change worse," said Fargione. Another study in the same issue by environmental economist Timothy Searchinger of Princeton found that growing biofuels almost anywhere in the world will result in land being cleared somewhere else for food or fuel.

The Science articles have caused a biofuels meltdown. Time, which only two months ago was celebrating Richard Branson's conversion of one of his Virgin Atlantic jets to biofuels, ran an April cover story, "The Clean Energy Myth." It called biofuels "catastrophic" and "environmentally disastrous."

In fact, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization has been screaming the same thing for years, to no avail. World food prices have almost doubled since 2005. There have been "tortilla riots" in Mexico and identical disturbances in Morocco, Egypt, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Mauritania, Cameroon, Senegal, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. True, the rising cost of energy and the perennial defects of Third World food markets are partly to blame. But the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington says biofuel conversion accounts for at least a fourth of this increase. Even in the United States, milk prices have jumped 50 percent because so much corn is being diverted from cows to gas tanks. C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, two agricultural experts at the University of Minnesota, predict that by 2025 bio-fuels will be responsible for 600 million more chronically hungry people. Jean Ziegler, a U.N. food expert, labeled biofuels a "crime against humanity" and called for a five-year moratorium. The great ethanol boom is a classic case of putting First World luxuries ahead of Third World necessities.

So how did we get into this mess? It's a matter of energy storage. The world is awash with energy. It is everywhere around us, mostly in the form of that dread word radiation. Radiation is the way energy travels in the universe. The radiation from the sun warms the earth and lights the day in quantities that make people say, "If only we could capture a small portion of that .  .  ." It has been almost the sole source of energy throughout the planet's history (remember that "almost").

The problem is capturing and storing it. Although solar energy is ubiquitous and almost incalculably vast, it is also very dilute. The world, after all, is a very big place. The amount of sunlight landing on a card table that can be converted to electricity is roughly enough to power four 100-watt light bulbs. This means that, if we could capture all the usable solar energy on every rooftop in the country, we would probably have about enough to provide our indoor lighting--except at night, of course, when it's most needed. Still, there's something to be had there, and it is being pursued by the technology of photovoltaics--turning sunlight into electricity.

A better strategy, however, is to find or create stores of solar energy that can be concentrated and used at will. Wind is solar energy nestled in the atmosphere. The sun heats air and sets it in motion, producing kinetic energy that can be transformed into work. Windmills can run mechanical machinery or turn electric turbines--which is why whole mountain ranges are now being decorated with 30-story, propeller-driven structures that look as if they were left there by a race of giants. Hydroelectric dams also store solar energy. The sun evaporates water, which falls and runs downhill. If we back this water up behind a dam, we can access the stored energy at will.

Wood and biofuels are also vaults of stored solar energy. Photosynthetic cells use sunlight to transform carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into long organic molecules. When we burn wood or biofuels, we break these carbon chains and release their "chemical" energy. The same holds true for fossil fuels, which are the highly distilled remains of ancient organisms.

The problem is that, except in the more concentrated form of fossil fuels, stored solar energy remains extremely dilute. Wind, hydro, and all the "alternate" sources of energy have been dubbed "green" because they are supposedly clean, renewable, and sustainable. In fact, what being "green" really means is that they all require vast amounts of land. In the beginning, when "alternate" efforts were still fairly modest, none of this much mattered. As they move up to industrial scale, however, the land requirements become staggering. And land, after all, is also a limited resource.

In a 2007 paper--well on its way to becoming a classic--Jesse Ausubel, director of the program for the human environment at Rockefeller University, calculated the amount of wood it would take to run one standard 1,000-megawatt electrical plant, the kind that can power a city the size of Cincinnati. Feeding the furnace year-round would require a forest of one thousand square miles. We have 600 such coal plants around the country now--to burn wood instead would require a forest the size of Alaska.

Other forms of stored solar energy make comparable demands. Glen Canyon Dam, which can produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity, is backed up by a reservoir 250 miles square (Lake Powell, in Arizona and Utah). That's why we stopped building dams in the 1960s--because they were drowning scenic canyons and displacing populations. (The 16,000-megawatt Three Gorges in China, probably the last major dam that will ever be built in the world, uprooted more than a million people.)

So it is with all forms of solar energy. Those 30-story windmills produce 1.5 megawatts apiece--about 1/750th the power of a conventional generating station. Getting 1,000 megawatts would require a wind farm 75 miles square. In a January cover story for Scientific American, three leading solar researchers proposed meeting our electrical needs in 2050 by covering southwestern desert with solar collectors. The amount of land required would be 34,000 square miles, about one-quarter of New Mexico.

And that's where biofuels went awry. Nobody ever bothered to calculate how much land they would require.

Like many other "alternate" efforts, biofuels can be traced to soft-energy guru Amory Lovins's famous 1976 essay in Foreign Affairs, "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" (It is still the most reprinted article in the journal's history, surpassing even George Kennan's 1947 "Mr. X" article proposing the "containment" strategy of the Cold War.) In "The Road Not Taken?" Lovins offered the domestic beer and wine industries as models of how displacing gasoline with homegrown fuels might be practical. Noting that the beer and wine industries already produced 5 percent the liquid of the oil industry, Lovins concluded:

Thus a conversion industry roughly ten to fourteen times the physical scale .  .  . of U.S. cellars and breweries, .  .  . would produce roughly one-third of the present gasohol requirements of the United States. .  .  . The scale of effort required does not seem unreasonable.

Lovins's article and his subsequent book Soft Energy Paths were enormously influential. When he visited the Oval Office in 1978 to advise Jimmy Carter on energy, Lovins found Soft Energy Paths sitting on the president's desk. Carter pushed an ethanol subsidy through Congress in the midst of the 1979 gas shortage, and we were on our way. Ethanol soon became a virtual franchise of Archer Daniels Midland, the powerful agricultural conglomerate, whose scores of distilleries around the Midwest now produce half our supply.

But notice that Lovins never bothered to calculate the amount of land that would be required. That's easy enough to estimate. Using Lovins's own figures, it comes to three times the land area of the United States, including Alaska, to produce one-third of our transportation energy needs in 1976.

Those numbers have barely changed. Writing in the Washington Post in 2006, two former enthusiasts of biofuels, James Jordan and James Powell of Brooklyn's Polytechnic University, noted:

It's difficult to understand how advocates of biofuels can believe they are a real solution to kicking our oil addition. .  .  . [T]he entire U.S. corn crop would supply only 3.7 percent of our auto and truck transport demands. Using the entire 300 million acres of U.S. cropland for corn-based ethanol production would meet about 15 percent of demand. .  .  . And the effects on land and agriculture would be devastating.

The extremely dilute nature of solar energy ensures that vast amounts of land will be necessary to capture and store it. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, may be bumping up against supply constraints and are creating environmental effects that will alter the earth's climate in unpredictable ways. So what other possibilities remain?

Some early enthusiasts of photovoltaics thought solar technology would be like computer technology with efficiencies and power doubling every 18 months--in a replay of the exponential growth in computing power first described by Intel founder Gordon Moore and now known as Moore's Law. After all, computer chips and photovoltaic cells are both made of silicon. But it doesn't work that way. Electrons have almost unlimited potential for storing information, but their ability to store energy is limited.

But electrons constitute only 0.001 percent of the mass of an atom. The remaining 99.999 percent is in the nucleus. The nucleus of the atom is the greatest storehouse of energy in the universe. The amount of energy released in the Hiroshima bomb was equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT. Yet the amount of matter transformed into energy at Hiroshima was about 3 grams. If we are ever going to access enough energy to run our industrial economy without overwhelming the environment in the process, we are going to have to find it in the nucleus of the atom.

The energy holding together the nucleus of an atom is called "binding energy." When an atom splits in two--which happens occasionally in nature and can be induced in a nuclear reactor--some binding energy is liberated. This energy release is two million times greater than any "chemical" releases that come in, say, an internal combustion engine or a coal-fired electrical generating plant. This 2-million differential explains why a 1,000-megawatt coal plant must be fed by a 110-car train loaded with 16,000 tons of coal arriving every day. Meanwhile a nuclear reactor of the same size is fed by a single flatbed truck that arrives with a new set of fuel rods once every 18 months. The energy stored in the nucleus of the atom is almost incomprehensibly larger than the energy stored in fossil fuels or the kinetic activity of wind, wave, or water.

Atomic energy occurs naturally in the earth with the breakdown of uranium and thorium atoms. It is enough to heat the core of the planet to 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit and is the only form of energy that does not come from the sun. We could call it "terrestrial energy," to differentiate it from solar energy.

Terrestrial energy is the answer to all the unpleasant questions raised by solar energy, which is why the nuclear industry in this country is poised for a comeback. Safety elements have been vastly improved, revamped plants are making enormous amounts of money, and the nuclear industry is chafing to start new construction. Although nuclear power cannot directly replace oil, it could become the basis of an expanded electrical grid that would support vehicles running on either electricity or hydrogen. It could end our energy odyssey. In light of last week's food riots and soaring world prices, it can't happen soon enough.

William Tucker's book, Terrestrial Energy, which will be published in August by Bartleby Press, can be previewed at www.terrestrialenergy.org.

[DeaconBenjamin]

We need to contact our reps and tell them we need more refineries, and drill for oil in our own country

You can suggest this as a start:

H.R.5437 Title: To promote alternative and renewable fuels, domestic energy production, conservation, and efficiency, to increase American energy independence, and for other purposes.

[RSmithOpt]

Hmmmm.....but we have no import duties on Chia pet stuff...not even poisoned pet food additives made from coal.

Ethanol is not a good fuel for autos....LNG, CNG are very clean.

Coal smokestack scrubbers already remove 70% of the pollutants, newer technologies are boasting 90% removal.

We need to send a bill to the greenies every time they take a dump in a municipal sewage system and every bag of trash they create.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Bump for tonight.

[Neoliberalnot]

Your ignorance of Agriculture is stifling to say the least. Have you ever planted anything besides a flower? Your hateful ax to grind against the world’s most productive food producers has an agenda not unlike the middle east oil producers. A little info on what others are paying for energy—you can blame American farmers for these prices too.

We have chosen just a few countries around the world that may give you an idea of what consumers are having to pay for gasoline in those countries. All amounts have been converted to U.S. $ and to U.S. Gallons. If you care to check other locations world wide, click on the link at the end of the list.
—
United States...... $3.61

Australia (Melbourne)........ $5.18
Brazil (São Paulo) ............. $6.01
Canada ....................... $4.62
China ............................. $2.44
Denmark (Copenhagen).... $8.14
Egypt (Cairo) ................... $0.93
Finland ........................... $7.98
Germany ........................ $8.63
Hong Kong ..................... $7.56
India (Bangalore) ............ $4.61
Iran ............................ $0.33
Israel ............................. $7.20
Italy .............................. $7.30
Japan ............................ $3.84
Kuwait (Kuwait City) ........ $0.78
Mexico (Mexico City)........ $2.36
New Zealand .................. $5.42
Nigeria (Lagos) ............... $0.38
Norway (Oslo) ................ $9.55
Philippines (Manila) ........ $3.54
Romania (Bucharest) ...... $6.32
Russia (Moscow) ........... $3.04
Saudi Arabia (Riyadh) .... $0.45
Singapore .................... $5.19
Switzerland (Zurich) ...... $6.24
Sweden ........................ $7.42
Thailand ....................... $2.61
Turkey ........................ $10.13
Turkmenistan ................ $0.29
Ukraine ........................ $4.43
United Kingdom ............. $8.18
Venezuela (Caracas) ...... $0.17

[Neoliberalnot]

‘You must not have much experience with diesel tractors.”

I grew up in Iowa.

But you’re a farmer, no wonder you are supporting ethanol. You finally can sell corn for more than it costs to plant.””

I stand corrected then. Please accept my apology. But I am telling you my tractor burns somewhere between 1/2 to 2/3 of a gallon/acre pulling a 15 no-till planter. I have lived in Iowa too. What a great place to farm with some of the most productive farmland in the world.

[Neoliberalnot]

“”What a load of bull. Corn exports are up even with the usage for ethanol.””

Yep, but most people commenting here have never sat a tractor and certainly would never take the time to view the USDA statistics on grain exports. The article is about vilifying agriculture and the world’s most productive food producers to further undermine the nation.

[fairtrader]

$1,200,000 per MVA for a new Coal plant

$2,000,000 per MVA for a new Nuke Plant.
*** (the actual number here is more like $3,000,000 when you factor in the Legal and Permitting Costs)

[thackney]

I do know that we have a good stock of uranium as well.

Really, then why is the majority of our uranium come from foreign suppliers?

Uranium Purchased by Owners and Operators of U.S. Civilian Nuclear Power Reactors, 1994-2006 Deliveries

U.S. Uranium Reserves Estimates
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/reserves/ures.html

[fairtrader]

The answer my friends is Helium3, which gives us real Fusion.

6.7 Tons would power the entire U.S. for a year

But we need to go to the Moon to Get it. Have you wondered why the Chineese, Russians, Indians, and Euopeans have this new found desire to explore the Moon ?

[thackney]

Heck, nuclear reprocessing of the fuel we have would go a long ways towards stretching the supply we have with the technology we have. But thanks to President Carter we cannot do that, unlike Japan, France and Russia.

[JasonC]

Red herring fallacy. It isn't grinding anything to demand that methods of production in a free economy operate on their actual costs and justify themselves by actual value delivered for those costs. The cheapest means should be used because they make the best use of abundant and the least of scarcer and more valuable resources. It is obvious at current prices that farmland can produce far more human value producing food, than it can producing ersatz gasoline, and its need for subsidy is the tangible sign of that patent fact.

If ethanol is supposedly beneficial, it does not need subsidizing. If it needs subsidizing, it is not beneficial. The rest is spin and a smoke machine.

[redgolum]

As a former ADM employee, I think you understate things! The corn side was like something out of a Sinclair novel. Did have much to do with the oil seed side, but their biggest problem was the plants kept catching on fire.

But the anti ethanol screed here lately is overdone. There is a place for ethanol, and the byproduct makes a lot better feed for cattle than corn. The problem is it was way oversold to guys who had no idea how to run a plant and who will end up going bankrupt. We have way to many plants for efficient distribution, not to mention cattle prices suck right now.

Ethanol is not causing food prices to rise, oil is. Many farmers I have talked to are very nervous right now. They can't contract their fuel out till fall anymore, and they are having a hard time locking in the prices for harvest. That is a recipe for disaster if fuel keeps going up or prices crash. Which they will.

[redgolum]

Ethanol in Brazil is going up in price. With the two major oil fields just found inside their waters, the need isn't as great as before. And many are switching from sugar cane to soy beans.

Besides if we import ethanol, people will blame that for starving penguins or something. The whole point of the “environmental” movement is control.

[redgolum]

Ever wonder what the subsidies on the oil side are?

For starters, they operate under a very loose version of the EPA permitting process. They can get away with things that the ethanol plants can't even dream of! (The Region V EPA guys I used to have to deal with laughed about it all the time.) And if you use the same methodology that Piemetal did for ethanol for oil, it is a rather interesting result. In case you aren't familiar with the Pimetal study (though every one from Rush Limbaugh to those on this board quote it all the time), he counted the energy used to build the shed the farmer's tractor sits in among other things to say ethanol doesn't work out. An NREL study showed that ethanol production in modern plants showed a net energy gain.

The ethanol subsidies have either run out or will soon. The most generous were (four years or so ago) in Minnesota, and they expired a while ago.

[JasonC]

The largest are - exempt from federal fuel tax; protected by a steep import tariff; general farm subsidies.

Remove them.

[Neoliberalnot]

Don’t be foolish, there isn’t an industry in the country that isn’t subsidized or that has not received a subsidy in the past. If the same rules apply to all, then no problem, but that is not reality.

I would rather there were no subsidies and that farmers had organized long ago to capture fair value for their products. My father sold corn for $2/Bu in 1950 which is the same price it sold for no more than 3 years ago. You have a pathetic understanding of agriculture and farmers aren’t here to put food on your plate for free. Look around you and see how many people consume too much grain.

[Delacon]

Because they can provide it at a cheaper price right now. Our deposits are in sandstone and refining it costs way more than it does for other countries whose deposits are more pure. The issue was if we had enough domestic uranium to supply the US’s reactors into the forseeable future if we had to. The answer is a qualified yes. We get our current domestic supply of uranium enriched by USEC. Currently the enrichment facilities can’t meet our demand. Their facilities would have to be massively expanded and updated. We are tied for forth with South Africa in known recoverable uranium supplies. There is also the political angle. We did an agreement to buy Russia’s weapons grade uranium back in 1993 called “megatons to megawatts” and 50% of our reactors our currently using Russian and US uranium that was intended for warheads.

[Delacon]

Thanks for the info but it really doesn’t answer my question. After costs of construction(and maintenance costs) are factored in, which is cheaper, a megawatt of coal powered electricity or a megawatt of nuclear powered electricity? This is not to be confused with what they will charge based on the market.

[ExSoldier]

....and drilling in our own oil fields, and building more refineries and telling the envir-O-NAZIs to go pound sand.

A-FREAKING-MEN! Well said!

[ctdonath2]

But that single flatbed truck hauling uranium required raw ore on par with that daily 110-car train load. There may be a 2,000,000:1 ratio of energy release, but it’s about two million times easier to mine & burn coal than mine & refine & split uranium.