Posts Tagged ‘Jimmy Carter’

Caught between a rock and a hard place, President Obama has chosen the rock.



According to a report in Bloomberg News, Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu told a Washington conference yesterday that the President will re-install the solar panels put atop the White House thirty years ago by President Jimmy Carter and rescued from a museum recently by global warming activists.

“The White House will lead by example,” Chu said. The panels only produce hot water. Chu said a set of photovoltaic panels to generate electricity would also be installed by next June. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had them up there,” he said. President Ronald Reagan took down the panels after taking office in 1981. Ironically, President George Bush, Jr. had solar panels installed to heat some of the residence plus maintenance building but received neither credit nor opprobrium for the effort.


Unfortunately, environmental activists have called the President’s hand at the exact moment when he is being widely compared to Carter’s “failed Presidency.”  Several magazines and cartoonists have recently offered illustrations of Obama looking in the mirror and seeing his Democratic predecessor from the 1970s. To his opponents, the solar panels could very well become a symbol of the continuity between the two administrations.


Obama has been put on the spot by global warming crusader Bill McKibben, a former New Yorker staffer and author of The End of Nature and Eaarth, which argues that climate change has already altered things so much that the earth has become “a tough new planet.”  McKibben lives for years in the remote Adirondacks before “returning to civilization” three years ago by taking a teaching job at Middlebury College in Vermont. He is the originator of 350.org and is now leading the “10.10.10” effort – a worldwide Internet-oriented day of recognition of global warming that will take place on October 10th.

Last year McKibben tracked down one of the original solar panels atop a cafeteria at Colby College in Maine, loaded them onto a trailer and made a much-heralded progression down the coast, headed for the White House. On the way he appeared on the David Letterman Show. When he arrived in D.C. last month, White House met with him but declined to accept the panels. Now the administration has changed its mind – obviously stung by recent restlessness in the environmental ranks.

Ironically, McKibben is one of those rare environmentalists who is willing to admit that nuclear must play a part in preventing global warming. Interviewed last July at the SolarFest in Tinmouth, Vermont, where he was the keynote speaker, McKibben said he knew nuclear was essential to reducing carbon emissions but didn’t like to say so in public. “It would split this movement in half,” he said, gesturing to the youthful crowd, many of whom had camped on a hillside farm for three days.

He was right. Half the gathering was there to celebrate solar energy while the other half was campaigning to close down Vermont Yankee, the state’s principal source of power.

Read more about it at Business Week and Politico
 

Environmentalist Bill McKibben has a flare for the dramatic. The author of Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet has organized “360,” a worldwide internet rally to keep the CO2 content of the earth’s atmosphere at 360 parts per million.

Now he has gone one better. McKibben is currently making a pilgrimage down the East Coast from Maine to Washington carrying a big of history – the solar panels that President Jimmy Carter once installed on the roof of the White House. McKibben received a write-up in the Washington Post yesterday and will try to present the panels to President Barack Obama over the weekend.

Whether the President will see solar panels as an opportunity to provide linkage to the need for climate legislation – or just another another reminder of the hapless Carter Administration – will soon be determined.

McKibben opines that failure to follow up on Carter’s initiative has meant forfeiting the solar future to China:  “I sat not long ago with Huang Ming, China’s leading solar entrepreneur, in his space-age Sun Moon Mansion in Shandong Province looking over the stats: his HiMin Solar Energy Group has put up 60 million such systems across China–he estimated that when 250 million Chinese take a shower, the hot water is coming off their roofs…"

In a biting symbol of the passed torch, he keeps one of the Carter panels in his private museum.” In an interview at SolarFest in Tinmouth, Vermont last July. McKibben acknowledged that nuclear power will have to be part of any worldwide effort to reduce carbon emissions. However, he said he didn’t like to bring this up in his public addresses. “It would split this movement in half,” he said, surveying the hordes of solar enthusiasts who camped for three days on a hillside farm. Most of the solar enthusiasts were also campaigning to close down Vermont Yankee, which provides one-third of Vermont’s electricity.

From the Editors
S. David Freeman, author of Jimmy Carter’s energy plan, scourge of nuclear power from the Tennessee Valley to Sacramento, and hero of the California Electrical Shortage, has long dreamed of putting solar energy in the desert.
 
Now those plans are running up against harsh reality.
 
When Freeman left the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in February to become head of the Hydrogen Car Company, he left behind plans to develop 80 square miles of solar collectors in the dried bed of Owens Lake, 250 miles east of Los Angeles. The LA city government’s secret acquisition of the lake was the main plotline of the movie “Chinatown.”  In 1913, LA officials quietly bought up land in the Owens Valley, then diverted the Owens River into the newly built Los Angeles Aqueduct to provide the city’s water supply. The drained lake has remained an eyesore and a bone of environmental contention ever since.
 
In his last days at LADWP, Freeman proposed covering 75 percent of the lake’s 110-mile surface with photovoltaic panels to produce 3000 MW or solar electricity, 10 percent of the state’s entire load. He also reasoned that the panels would hold down dust storms created by gale wind sweeping down form the surrounding mountains. Since losing a lawsuit in 1997, LA has been under court to bring environmental restoration to the valley.
 
Things aren’t working out as planned. The extremely caustic mud that makes up the dried lake bottom has proved to be poor support for the solar panels. Preliminary tests on an 80-acre pilot site have shown the panels would sink several inches into the extremely corrosive soil. Moreover, the prospect now is that, rather than holding down dust storms, the panels themselves may become covered with dust, requiring even larger amounts of precious water to keep them clean.
 
As problems have mounted in the lakebed, fears are rising that the LADWP may turn to another 50 square miles of desert it owns north of Lake Owens for its solar project. “Developing that land would require large-scale leveling of wind-deposited soil anchored by desert shrubs, possibly creating a new source of dust storms,” says Michael Prather, an Owens Valley environmental activist.
 
In Freeman’s 2007 book, Winning Our Energy Independence, the former Presidential advisor advocated developing renewable energy as the alternative to the “three poisons – dirty coal, foreign oil and dangerous nuclear power.”  In the Owens Valley, clean, renewable solar energy isn’t turning out to be such an easy task.

Read more at the LA Times

Did Milton Shaw, a 1970s member of the Atomic Energy Commission, try to subvert the fast breeder reactor and close down Oak Ridge?  Was thorium a better route toward nuclear?  Was Alvin Weinberg the victim of all this?

Charles Barton reviews the whole subject in a lengthy blog post, “Milton Shaw and the Road to Energy Failure.”  Much of it is old and forgotten arguments, but it is certainly interesting to hear President Richard Nixon telling Congress:  “Our best hope today for meeting the Nation's growing demand for economical clean energy lies with the fast breeder reactor.”

It’s hard to tell whether this kind of soul searching moves the ball forward. What’s done is done and it’s hard to go back and pinpoint a particular moment in time or individual and say this is where things went wrong. President Jimmy Carter’s canceling of fuel reprocessing was probably the most fateful decision in the long history of nuclear, but we still managed to complete more than fifty reactors after 1976 and we may get the chance to revisit reprocessing yet.

The important thing is the Nuclear Renaissance is moving forward. Rather than the “road to energy failure” we should be talking about the road to energy success.

Read more at Nuclear Green

Then come back to Nuclear Townhall and tell us your thoughts

- William Tucker

There’s no two ways about it – the 47-nation summit that just wound up yesterday will give a big boost – maybe even permanent momentum – to the world’s conversion to nuclear energy.

Although it wasn’t emphasized at the gathering – and may not even have been President Obama’s intention – the overall impact of the summit will be that the proliferation aspects of spreading nuclear programs can be handled and with proper international supervision and cooperation the diversion of bomb material into the hands of terrorist groups does not constituter a fatal deterrence to civilian programs.

To see how much this represents progress, consider what the paradigm has been to date. I the 1970s, nuclear opponents convinced President Jimmy Carter that the mere handling of spent fuel and the separation of plutonium would be a fatal step that would inevitably lead to bomb material falling into the hands of terrorists or rogue countries. (Ted Taylor, the renegade nuclear scientist who was the subject of John McPhee’s book, The Curve of Binding Energy, predicted confidently that by the 1990s there would be “hundreds” of nuclear explosions in American cities resulting from stolen plutonium. We stopped reprocessing and got the problem of “nuclear waste” instead.

President George W. Bush, Jr. tried to remedy this mistake through his Global Nuclear Energy Partnership – GNEP – and it is amazing how that effort is now completely ignored by press and politicians alike so that it is as if it never happened. Bush proposed reviving the reprocessing industry in this country so that we could provide developing nations with low enriched uranium and then take it off their hands again when it was spent, so they could have nuclear programs without ever developing the infrastructure for handling nuclear material. This is exactly what is being proposed now, except the U.S. no longer plays the central role. (Bush did imagine the current nuclear nations – France, Britain, Canada and Russia – forming a cooperative union.)

President Obama has put the cart before the horse – emphasizing the cradle-to-grave control of nuclear material without specifying who will handle the material or where it will be reprocessed. Kazakhstan has even volunteered since they are the source of one-third of the world’s uranium and developed a reputation for trustworthiness when they surrendered their nuclear weapons after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

But even with the cart before the horse, horse-and-cart are going to arrive at the same destination sometime. Sooner or later, somebody is going to say, “Why doesn’t the U.S. develop the capability for supplying the world with nuclear material and reprocessing it when it is done?”  And then we’ll be on our way.

China Daily, the English language Chinese news agency, ran an article this week, “US Wakes from Nuclear Energy Slumber,” comparing the U.S. to Rip Van Winkle. “A thunder from China has woken up Uncle Sam, like Rip Van Winkle, from a 20-year nap, to a different world. This world is in the midst of a Green Revolution. It is the biggest sea change since the Industrial Revolution, and Uncle Sam has slept too long to take the lead in this new movement.” 

Self-congratulations aside, give credit where credit is due. The Chinese have seized on nuclear and have sprinted ahead of us on the development of new reactors, building the Westinghouse AP1000 and Areva’s EPR when those reactors haven’t yet won design approval in this country.

But remember what they used to say about China when that nation was enduring its long pre-Industrial Age slumber:  “When a sleeping giant awakes . . . . “

Read the various takes on the Nuclear Summit at these sites.  Notice the Christian Science Monitor comes to the exact same conclusion we do – the real outcome of the summit will be to facilitate the spread of civilian nuclear energy.  But it sees this as a bad outcome, not good.

Associated Press

Fox News

Copyright © 2010, Nuclear Townhall

Support the nuclear movement, donate to Nuclear Townhall

Sign up for our Email Flashes to get the latest news, analysis and commentary from Nuclear Townhall