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

170Disasters Waiting to Happenspeeded for a shift in the next century to heavy reliance on fast breeder reactors–eachfueled with about seven tons of plutonium (over three thousandbombs’ worth), and all critically dependent on a very small number of reprocessingand fuel-fabrication plants.•Vastly expanding the extraction of oil and gas offshore. This would requiredrilling in high-risk areas, especially in stormy and faraway Arctic waters.Major gathering centers, pipelines, terminals, and conditioning plants wouldbecome even more critical to national fuel supplies.•Building a twenty-seven-billion-dollar Alaskan Natural Gas TransportationSystem to bring North Slope gas via Canada to the Midwest. The gas wouldtravel a total of four thousand eight hundred miles just to enter the domesticpipeline grid. It would arrive at a daily rate equivalent to between three andsix percent of present total U.S. natural gas use. The gas conditioning plantand the forty-eight-inch, seven hundred-forty-three-mile Alaskan section ofpipeline would nearly double the U.S. gas pipeline rate base. There would beno alternative way to deliver the gas. 2• Shifting from the historically diverse and dispersed pattern of coal-mining–in1979, six thousand mines in twenty-six-states–towards overwhelming dependenceon major strip-mines, mostly in a single Western area. By the year 2000,the Burlington Northern Company’s diesel trains would carry out ofWyoming’s Powder River Basin three-fourths as much energy as all the oilwhich the U.S. now imports from all countries. Through a handful of singlerail corridors would flow far more coal than is now mined in all the rest of thecountry put together (as the maps in Figures One and Two illustrate). 3 Theterrain is remote and rugged. If the sort of systematic sabotage and bombingof coal trains and railroads which is already endemic in Appalachia 4 weredirected against the future flow of Western coal, it could interdict far moreenergy than an oil embargo could today, and would leave far few alternatives.•Creating–chiefly in remote, arid Western areas–synthetic fuels industry convertingcoal and shale into two million barrels per day of expensive liquid andgaseous fuels by 1992. Most of the synfuel plants would use untested technology.5 Each typical plant would rank among the largest construction projectsever undertaken. 6 A single plant would occupy a square mile, directly employfour thousand workers, and cost several billion dollars. It would be thirty timesas large as the largest U.S. pilot plant to date (and several times as large as theSouth African SASOL One or the 1944 German plants, all of which were suchtempting targets that they were destroyed, as described in Chapter Seven). Anominal plant would, if it worked, consume as much energy and water as asizeable city–both imported from far away. The fluid fuels would be shippedout through long pipelines at a rate of fifty thousand barrels per day. Two such