Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

The notes for Chapter 12 appear on page 366 of this pdf.Chapter TwelveForward, Lemmings!The previous chapters have described the brittleness of America’s major energysystems: oil and gas (including LNG and LPG), and central electric powerstations–fossil-fueled, nuclear, and hydro–with their grids. 1 Together theseenergy sources account today for approximately ninety-five percent of ournation’s total energy supply. Their vulnerabilities cannot be eliminated bybuilding the same types of devices differently. Cosmetic changes in the detailsof this system while leaving its basic architecture essentially unchanged wouldpreserve all its major sources of weakness. The vulnerabilities documented inthis book are inherent in the nature of highly centralized energy technologies.As if heedless of the risk, the energy industries are spending more thaneighty billion dollars per year (and getting over ten billion dollars per year infederal tax subsidies) to build technologies which are still more centralized,complicated, and brittle. Industry and government are jointly creating for thetwenty-first century an American energy system which not merely embodiesbut multiplies the same fragilities that threaten our national security today.The major elements of this ambitious plan for the next twenty yearsinclude the following:• More than doubling national electric generating capacity. The grid wouldhave to be expanded to match; so would devices which use electricity. Thenew plants, costing over a trillion dollars to build, would burn mostly coal anduranium from Western mines. Compared to today’s highly vulnerable centralstations, the new plants would be even bigger, clustered in fewer and moreremote sites, and linked by longer, higher-voltage transmission lines. Morelong lines would also be built to import large blocks of power from at leastfour provinces of Canada.•Tripling or quadrupling nuclear power capacity. Preparations would be169