A Pocket Guide To Energy Planning And Problems That Must Be Resolved To Keep the World Energy Strong John A. Shanahan August 16, 2022 Reliable, affordable energy is essential for doing everything. For thousands of years, the only energy sources were sunlight, wind, water, and biomass. Sunlight warmed the Earth, enabled plants to grow, and evaporated fresh water from the oceans. Wind carried water vapor and clouds to the land to enable plants to grow and provide drinking water. Wind was used for military and commercial ships and milling agricultural products. Biomass provided energy for heating, cooking, and manufacturing. With the discovery of coal, oil, and natural gas, the standard of living increased tremendously and with it, the world’s population. They provide over 80% of the energy the world has used since the late 1800s. They enabled the world to abandon the practise of slavery in many cases and to support the ideas of freedom and democracy. In the middle of the 20th century commercial nuclear power became available and along with it many nuclear technologies and by-products. Fossil fuels, their synthetic hydrocarbon equivalents in the future, nuclear power and their by-products can provide for global prosperity for as long as we inhabit the Earth. Alarmists are determined to prevent this prosperity from continuing and human population to exceed levels prior to 1800. They are wrongfully claiming that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is a catastrophic pollutant and fossil fuels must remain in the ground. They are claiming that nitrogen, essential for modern agriculture, must be substantially reduced in food production. They are claiming that low-dose radiation is hazardous. We must use the completely arbitrary Linear No-Threshold Hypothesis and Collective Dose Corollary for radiation safety guidelines. This has stopped new nuclear power plants and limited use of radioisotopes for diagnostic and therapeutic nuclear medicine. The nuclear regulatory and environmental agencies must be reorganized. If the alarmists succeed in stopping fossil fuels, nuclear power, and modern agriculture, our economies will collapse and western civilization will disappear. Our foreign enemies won’t have to do anything to take over the free world. 1
Specific recommendations: 1) Change the laws, culture, and regulations of environmental and nuclear regulatory agencies to support licensing and new construction for refineries, pipelines, and nuclear power plants. Get alarmist people out of the system. 2) Promote nuclear spent fuel reprocessing like is done in France. This will result in a much smaller volume of actual hazardous radioactive waste that only needs to be stored for about 500 years, not millions of years. 3) Promote all kinds of nuclear power from uranium and thorium. Smaller nuclear power plants can be manufactured in factories. The components are easier to transport on highways and over bridges. Financing is easier. There is enough uranium and thorium to support all the world’s energy needs for a long time. 4) Reliable electrical energy from fossil fuel and nuclear plants is essential. Fossil fuel and nuclear power plants are vulnerable to the same acts of terrorism that would stop their use for a long time. No electricity means a collapse of the economy and civilization as we know it. Protect all electric generating plants from acts of terrorism that would stop generation of electricity for a long time. 5) Support sound agricultural and soil science. Review current practices. Continue use of nitrogen fertilizers. The world’s food supplies depend on this. 6) Governments should support sound policies for use of fossil fuels and fission nuclear power. Not wind, solar or fusion energy to “take us to the stars.” 7) Face the reality of global nuclear power rollout. It is going to take a long time for the whole world to be using nuclear power. Third World countries need to improve their economies and governments with fossil fuels, if available, rather than nuclear power. The whole world won’t be on fission nuclear power for more than a century or two. Commercial nuclear fusion power will take longer, if ever. 8) Explore the best technologies to produce fresh water from the ocean. In some areas of the world, nature produced fresh water is too unreliable. Use floating nuclear power plants to produce the fresh water. They can be moved from place to place, wherever the need arises. John A. Shanahan Denver, Colorado, USA Tel. 303 399 0393 Email - john.shanahan@allaboutenergy.net 2