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Coal. We will leave this chart up and put another chart in front of this because we want to come back to this one. The chart we put in front shows coal, and you have heard that we have 250 years of use, that is true, with no growth at current use rates. Remember that flat curve we showed before? No growth at current use rates.
This is perfectly flat. It will last us 250 years with no growth, but if it just grows 1.1 percent a year it will only last that long. Less than 150 years. At 2 percent growth it will last less than 100 years. But what are you going to do with coal? You cannot put it in the trunk of your car and go down the road. You have to convert coal to a liquid or a gas so that you can use it. And when you have a 2 percent growth rate and after conversion you are now down about 50 years of supply. And you have got to use a lot of energy to make sure that you clean up the coal.
We appropriate money from the Congress for clean coal technology, I support that, because we cannot use coal in the traditional way because it is enormously polluting.
We will go back now to our chart we were looking at the options that we have. The only thing on this table here that comes close to the energy density of fossil fuels is nuclear. Now, a lot of people have some big concerns about nuclear. But we have had 104 nuclear power plants in our country. We have never had a fatal accident. We have never had any real serious accidents there. Three Mile Island, by the way, was not a catastrophe. It was very unfortunate. As far as I know nobody was hurt from that and we learned a lot from that.
There are three different ways we can get nuclear energy. The way that will get us home free is fusion, that is what happens in the sun. And by the way, the sun is the origin of the most of energy that we have. All of the fossil fuels came from the sun ultimately. The ferns grew that produced the coal. The little organisms that grew in the water that settled to the bottom and were later covered over by silt, and then with the movement of tectonic plates they were buried with heat and pressure.
In time they became oil.
The odds of getting fusion in time are pretty small. I would like to use the analogy that me trying to solve my personal economic problems by winning the lottery is pretty much the same kind of odds that we face if we want to solve our energy problems in our country with fusion. That does not keep me from voting for the something less than $300 million that we appropriate each year to fusion, because if we get there we are really home free. That is incredible. But that is probably not going to happen. We certainly would not bank on it. If it happens that is nice. Like winning the lottery, if it happens that is nice.
Two other kinds of energy is from nuclear. These are fission. One of those is whitewater reactor, which is the kind we have in this country. This uses uranium which is in even shorter supply in the world than oil. So that will not last forever.
Ultimately if we are going to get large amounts of energy from nuclear figures, we are going to have to go to breeder reactors. France gets about 80 percent of their electricity from nuclear and they have a lot of breeder reactors. With breeder reactors, you buy a problem of waste products that you have to store away we believe for maybe a quarter of a million years. That is a time span we can even think of and how do you safely store something away for a quarter of a million years?
Anything that has that much energy in it ought to be good for something. If it is so hot, if it has so much energy in it that you have got to store it away, you cannot even come close to it for a quarter of a million years, I would think you have not unleashed the ingenuity of the American people to see what we can do with that energy. I just think there is some potential there that we have not tapped.
Our time for this evening is nearly up. So what I want to do now is just mention, and we will be coming back again for a full hour and we will be talking about in detail about these renewable resources down here, what can we realistically expect from them and what do we need to do to get them started? Solar and wind and geothermal, tapping that hot molten iron core of the earth. Ocean energy, the tides and the waves. Lots of potential from agriculture, soy diesel, bio diesel, ethanol, methanol, bio mass.
Waste of energy. Great idea. Rather than filling landfills with it, burn it and get energy from it. By the way, the heat you got from it ought to be used for heating people's home. It ought not be wasted in evaporating water in a big tower outside town.
Last, we will close with hydrogen from renewable. Hydrogen is not an energy source. You cannot mine hydrogen. You cannot suck it out of the air. The only way you get hydrogen is to produce it.
Right now we are getting hydrogen from natural gas. It would be better to get it from renewables. We can do that. We can get it from nuclear. One of the things you might do with a nuclear plant is to split water to get hydrogen. You put that hydrogen in a fuel cell in your car. It has at least twice the efficiency of the reciprocating engine. It
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produces only water when you burn it. You do not have a flame but you are, in effect, chemically burning it in the fuel cell.
There are lots of things to look at here. But the real urgency here is that we have got to buy time by conservation and by efficiency so that we can use the limited resources of oil that we have, not only to continue the economies we now have in the world, but to make the investments we must make in these renewables so that we are going to continue to be able to live the kinds of qualities lives that we have been living.
I am sure that Americans are up to this. What we need is leadership articulating the problem and articulating the things that Americans need to do. Americans just need leadership. We are the envy of the world and we need to be a world leader in this because we use most of the oil in the world.
I would note that you can turn to our Web site and there you will find a discussion of these items of links that will carry you are to other places. If you would like to order a video or DVD, this is the telephone number you call at C-SPAN.
END
This is perfectly flat. It will last us 250 years with no growth, but if it just grows 1.1 percent a year it will only last that long. Less than 150 years. At 2 percent growth it will last less than 100 years. But what are you going to do with coal? You cannot put it in the trunk of your car and go down the road. You have to convert coal to a liquid or a gas so that you can use it. And when you have a 2 percent growth rate and after conversion you are now down about 50 years of supply. And you have got to use a lot of energy to make sure that you clean up the coal.
We appropriate money from the Congress for clean coal technology, I support that, because we cannot use coal in the traditional way because it is enormously polluting.
We will go back now to our chart we were looking at the options that we have. The only thing on this table here that comes close to the energy density of fossil fuels is nuclear. Now, a lot of people have some big concerns about nuclear. But we have had 104 nuclear power plants in our country. We have never had a fatal accident. We have never had any real serious accidents there. Three Mile Island, by the way, was not a catastrophe. It was very unfortunate. As far as I know nobody was hurt from that and we learned a lot from that.
There are three different ways we can get nuclear energy. The way that will get us home free is fusion, that is what happens in the sun. And by the way, the sun is the origin of the most of energy that we have. All of the fossil fuels came from the sun ultimately. The ferns grew that produced the coal. The little organisms that grew in the water that settled to the bottom and were later covered over by silt, and then with the movement of tectonic plates they were buried with heat and pressure.
In time they became oil.
The odds of getting fusion in time are pretty small. I would like to use the analogy that me trying to solve my personal economic problems by winning the lottery is pretty much the same kind of odds that we face if we want to solve our energy problems in our country with fusion. That does not keep me from voting for the something less than $300 million that we appropriate each year to fusion, because if we get there we are really home free. That is incredible. But that is probably not going to happen. We certainly would not bank on it. If it happens that is nice. Like winning the lottery, if it happens that is nice.
Two other kinds of energy is from nuclear. These are fission. One of those is whitewater reactor, which is the kind we have in this country. This uses uranium which is in even shorter supply in the world than oil. So that will not last forever.
Ultimately if we are going to get large amounts of energy from nuclear figures, we are going to have to go to breeder reactors. France gets about 80 percent of their electricity from nuclear and they have a lot of breeder reactors. With breeder reactors, you buy a problem of waste products that you have to store away we believe for maybe a quarter of a million years. That is a time span we can even think of and how do you safely store something away for a quarter of a million years?
Anything that has that much energy in it ought to be good for something. If it is so hot, if it has so much energy in it that you have got to store it away, you cannot even come close to it for a quarter of a million years, I would think you have not unleashed the ingenuity of the American people to see what we can do with that energy. I just think there is some potential there that we have not tapped.
Our time for this evening is nearly up. So what I want to do now is just mention, and we will be coming back again for a full hour and we will be talking about in detail about these renewable resources down here, what can we realistically expect from them and what do we need to do to get them started? Solar and wind and geothermal, tapping that hot molten iron core of the earth. Ocean energy, the tides and the waves. Lots of potential from agriculture, soy diesel, bio diesel, ethanol, methanol, bio mass.
Waste of energy. Great idea. Rather than filling landfills with it, burn it and get energy from it. By the way, the heat you got from it ought to be used for heating people's home. It ought not be wasted in evaporating water in a big tower outside town.
Last, we will close with hydrogen from renewable. Hydrogen is not an energy source. You cannot mine hydrogen. You cannot suck it out of the air. The only way you get hydrogen is to produce it.
Right now we are getting hydrogen from natural gas. It would be better to get it from renewables. We can do that. We can get it from nuclear. One of the things you might do with a nuclear plant is to split water to get hydrogen. You put that hydrogen in a fuel cell in your car. It has at least twice the efficiency of the reciprocating engine. It
[Page: H2813]
produces only water when you burn it. You do not have a flame but you are, in effect, chemically burning it in the fuel cell.
There are lots of things to look at here. But the real urgency here is that we have got to buy time by conservation and by efficiency so that we can use the limited resources of oil that we have, not only to continue the economies we now have in the world, but to make the investments we must make in these renewables so that we are going to continue to be able to live the kinds of qualities lives that we have been living.
I am sure that Americans are up to this. What we need is leadership articulating the problem and articulating the things that Americans need to do. Americans just need leadership. We are the envy of the world and we need to be a world leader in this because we use most of the oil in the world.
I would note that you can turn to our Web site and there you will find a discussion of these items of links that will carry you are to other places. If you would like to order a video or DVD, this is the telephone number you call at C-SPAN.
END
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