Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Our unnecessary nuclear future - SFBG Politics Blog

Our unnecessary nuclear future - SFBG Politics Blog

More on effort to revive nuclear power as an answer to global warming.

Following is an article I wrote a couple of years ago warning of Bohemian Grove connections to the support for this lie:

Lynn Orr, Bohemian Behind the Rebirth of Nuclear Power

by Don Eichelberger

Lynn Orr, director of the Global Climate and Energy Project (G-CEP), at the

press

conference announcing the creation of the project, Nov. 20, 2002.

[photo]

In 2002, Stanford University announced the creation of the Global Climate

and Energy Project, naming the interim head of the Stanford Earth Sciences

Dept, Lynn Orr, as director. His training as a hydraulics engineer has

focused on wringing more oil and gas deposits out of the earth's mantle,

and discovering ways of "sequestering" CO2 in deep geologic formations.

His conversations with Schlumberger (oil well drilling equipment and

technical support), ExxonMobil and General Electric helped develop the idea

for the project. DCEP has grown to include E.On, one of the world's

largest energy holding companies. E.On's holdings include natural gas and

oil wells, coal mines, electric production and distribution facilities,

including the newly acquired systems in Spain and Kentucky.

The stated goal of DCEP is to develop the means "to produce sufficient

energy to meet the needs of a growing world population in a way that

protects the environment..."

Orr's hope is to pull more students in to engineering careers and put them

to work solving the technical problems leading to plentiful energy and

fewer greenhouse gasses. He is a true believer that technology and

engineering will get us out of the problems we face. As a director of the

David and Lucille Packard Foundation with his wife, Susan Packard-Orr, he

has already endowed scholarships at Stanford.

Pulling together the massive resources of GE, ExxonMobil, E.On and

academia, he is also working to develop an integrated international energy

grid, drawing from all energy sources that do not produce greenhouse

gasses, or whose gasses can be sequestered. Prominently mentioned in his

speech announcing DCEP, Orr made it clear nuclear power has a welcome place

in the world's energy mix. GE is a founding member of DCEP, and proud

inventor of the boiling water reactor, work horse of the current nuclear

industry. They have developed a new generation of "safe" reactors they

make no secret of wanting to build. They predict that 4% of new generation

built in Europe will come from nuclear by 2015.

GE is also diversifying, and has recently acquired offshore natural gas

leases near marine sanctuaries in the Gulf of Mexico. They are investing

in creating an infrastructure that will allow them to get the remaining

natural gas from sources that were too played out to bother with while gas

prices were low. Now....

Following are key passages from Lynn Orr's speech announcing formation of

DCEP in 2002:

"Imagine a set of global energy systems that will meet society's

requirements for energy with low greenhouse emissions. What will the

primary energy sources be: solar, wind, nuclear power, biomass, fossil fuels?

"In this project, we will build a research portfolio that seeks

opportunities across the full range of primary energy sources, and we will

carry out pre-commercial research that will add innovative technologies and

systems to the global energy mix. We will concentrate on the technology

research, and we will consider safety, environmental impacts, market

acceptance, social responsibility and cost as we build the research effort.

"The mix of future energy technologies will interact in complex ways. Let

me give you an example. Suppose for the moment, that hydrogen becomes the

preferred transportation fuel of the future. We will need to find ways to

generate H2 on a large scale and at reasonable cost. The development of an

advanced infrastructure for hydrogen distribution could favor generation of

the hydrogen at central facilities, while the absence of such an

infrastructure would favor distributed generation.

"If hydrogen were made centrally from methane, coal or other fossil fuel

sources, then CO2 would also be generated as a by-product, and it would be

necessary to separate, capture and store the CO2 generated (perhaps in

depleted oil and gas reservoirs, or unmineable coal beds, for example). On

the other hand, if sufficient electricity could be generated by solar, wind

or nuclear power to make hydrogen from water, no CO2 would be created in

the hydrogen generation step, and CO2 sequestration methods would be less

important."

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