The Earth Hearing

by Daniel Plonix

  Chapter 46

  The Reservation, Deep Underground, Commission Building

  It was the third week of testimony. And after that, it would be time for the delegation from Earth to make its case.

  Along with Aratta and the Chief Examiner, the director of the Nature Survey Group was testifying again in the Commission Building. This time about energy power generation.

  “Your Graces, in addition to fossil fuel, electricity-generating dams have to go, too,” the director was saying. “Well, in fact all dams do.”

  “And what might those be?” inquired the presiding chair.

  “They funnel water through a narrow channel. The subsequent high pressure water spins their turbines. Alas, enormous amounts of river-­borne sediments, which otherwise would have replenished downstream ecosystems, are trapped behind tens of thousands of dams.

  “These dams of theirs have mucked with just about every major water artery on the planet. Toxins are not being carried to the oceans. The water bursting out of turbines comes from the depths of the reservoir, containing water that holds almost no oxygen—thus decimating fish downstream. In addition, waterways have been losing their natural temp­erature differential. And fish migration, spawning, nesting, and feeding are also out of whack.”

  “What are we looking at?”

  “In the last forty-five years, they have lost close to 90 percent of their big freshwater animals—such as catfish and stingrays—in part due to the loss of free-flowing rivers. Among them was the giant Chinese paddlefish; it’s now extinct.

  “In summary, burning up dead organic matter and clogging the water arteries of the planet—combined, they account for most of their electric power generation.”

  “And you are telling us it’s the best they can do?” inquired one of the commissioners.

  The slender director smoothed her dress. “Madam Commissioner, I would suggest that, by definition, what you see out there is the best they can do. But if you are inquiring whether this is the best given their technological know-how, then no; they can do considerably better. In fact, using existing Earth technology, the investigative team fleshed out two schemes that, on the whole, have a lower impact. However, with the Terraneans’ level of knowledge, nothing that keeps over seven billion people afloat and plugged in can be all that clean, green, or renewable.” She bowed. “I will let the Chief Examiner speak to this.”

  “Please proceed,” said the presiding chair as the Examiner took his place at the lectern.

  “Your Graces,” opened Rafirre, “nuclear energy is poised to be the best electricity generation technology; on balance, it exerts the least amount of ecological footprint.”

  “Accidents?”

  “Two notable ones. In the first one, they had an ill-executed engineering test on a reactor with no containment shell. In the second one, they had an accident with a reactor situated in an active seismic zone that was hit by a massive tsunami wave. Dumb judgment calls. All the same, these two incidents occurred in a context of hundreds of nuclear power plants operating with zero fatalities for decades on end.

  “They have some nuclear reactors approved or under construction that are even safer than anything out there. Those next-generation plants are equipped with emergency cooling systems that use passive and stored energy. Furthermore, future reactors can be constructed in remote areas, far away from population centers and tectonic fault lines, and can be connected via superconducting cables hundreds or thousands of kilometers long.”

  “What about the nuclear waste?”

  “On the shores of Gulf of Bothnia, Finland, they are building a storage unit engineered to safely store nuclear waste. We believe the scheme is sound.

  “The fuel pellet will be contained within a highly corrosion-resistant rod made of zirconium-based alloy. A bundle of these rods will be placed in a canister whose interior is graphite cast-iron and its exterior copper. The canisters will be moved into a tunnel within a repository very deep below the surface. Each canister is to be deposited into an individual hole, which later will be filled with bentonite clay. When mixed with water, this clay swells to provide protection against earthquakes. The storage tunnel will be backfilled, and a thick concrete plug will be cast at its end.

  “Let’s assume an improbable case of an earthquake in that region, and one severe enough to damage the canisters and tear them open and somehow cause the radioactive material to come in contact with groundwater. The resultant radiation is reckoned to be far less than the total annual average radiation people are exposed to in daily life.”

  “Noted.”

  “Your Graces, a few thousand reactors can power all the population centers of the world,” Rafirre told the commissioners.

  “Problems?”

  “Conventional reactors utilize but a small fraction of the energy in uranium. The rest is left unused. The known recoverable resources do not suffice even to power the planet for two decades. Granted, the known deposits may very well be the tip of a far larger uranium iceberg. But we would not suggest basing an entire setup on a maybe, even a promising maybe.

  “Then there is the integral fast reactor. It uses almost all the energy latent in uranium. A lump of fuel the size of a toy marble will suffice to power fifty middle-class household for one year. Better yet, these integral fast reactors can utilize existing nuclear waste, which just on its own will suffice to run the world for centuries.

  “It looks good on paper. However, beyond a pilot reactor that was shut down a few decades ago, there is little to go by way of safety record. Nevertheless, it is informative to note an experiment this pilot nuclear reactor underwent.

  “In April 1986, the coolant was cut off in Chernobyl, and the sub­se­quent explosion tore off the roof. It is one of the two accidents I alluded to earlier. About the same time, a similar experiment was conducted with the integral fast reactor: it was brought to full power, and the cooling pumps were turned off.

  “The temperature shot up to 704°C; yet, it was well below the coolant’s—liquid sodium—boiling point. After a while, the core temperature came down until it reached normal operating levels. No damage, no nothing. The composition of the reactor’s fuel pins was such that if they begin to overheat, they expand, and the fission reaction comes to an end.”

  “Sounds promising.”

  “That it is, presiding chair,” replied Rafirre. “But that may be all it ever will be. You surely understand you’re dealing with people who are one sandwich short of a picnic. They’re not truly sane. Therefore, a global, ubiquitous deployment of either type of reactors is unlikely. The one million people who die worldwide from car collisions each year may be an acceptable body count. The millions of people worldwide who die prematurely from ambient air pollution owing to fossil fuel emission may be an acceptable body count. Yet, there is no level of acceptable risk when it comes to nuclear power. Not ten people killed each year and certainly not one thousand.”

  “Understood,” said the presiding chair.

  One of the commissioners leaned forward. “I understand your team has also modeled a second energy generation scheme.”

  “Yes, Madam Commissioner,” said the Examiner. “The second scheme is a series of transcontinental, interconnected installations that harvest solar and wind energy along with storing the excess as hydrogen. Ecologically, it imposes a far more substantial footprint than the nuclear option I’ve just presented.

  “In our modeling of the solar-wind setup, we have partitioned the world to fourteen transcontinental energy regions. Among them, they cover practically all population centers. Each energy region contains both wind and solar resources in sufficient amounts. Each energy region includes tens of thousands of installations spread across thousands of miles. From one cluster of installations or another, the transcontinental array generates electricity around the clock, winter and summer, rain or shine.

 
“Wind and sun ought to be harvested where they are abundant,” said Rafirre. “Hence, areas with existing degraded land in North Africa may supply solar power to serve people throughout the coastal towns of the Mediterranean and all the way up to Scotland. Wind turbine installations in the windy Great Plains of North America are to provide power to the population centers of the East Coast. And windy Patagonia is to provide for the urban coastal areas of Brazil.

  “Each self-contained, transcontinental region is to have an underground network of superconducting cables spanning hundreds and thousands of miles. I have referred to them earlier. The energy cost in keeping these super-chilled is modest, and they allow the transmission of power across vast distances without notable losses.

  “Concentrated solar power technologies, such as solar power towers are to be the backbone.”

  “What are those solar towers you speak of?”

  “Your Grace, fancy many thousands of giant mirrors tracking the sun’s path throughout the day. In tandem, they reflect the sun’s rays, directing them to a bank of tubes located on top of a central receiver tower. The tubes contain salt, which the converging rays of the sun heat up. Subsequently, the molten salt flows down into a storage tank. Later, the scorching-hot salt is routed from the storage tank to heat exchangers. The resultant heated water is used to generate electricity in a conventional steam turbine cycle.

  “In the interim, the tank stores the molten salt until it is time to generate electricity. Essentially, this decouples power generation from the capture of solar energy. This makes it possible to have power on demand, both when the sun is shining and when it is not.

  “The scheme is supplemented by more intermittent power sources such as photovoltaic farms and wind turbine installations. These sources of power help to significantly lower the total land footprint of the energy generating installations.”

  He added, “Generating and storing hydrogen help to largely compensate for the seasonal variations. Excess energy is converted to hydrogen, to be converted back at a later point.”

  “You must lose a lot of energy in the process of creating hydrogen and then, later, generating electricity out of it.”

  “If anything, that’s an understatement, Your Grace. To end up with 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity when they need it, they will have to invest 3.14 kilowatt-hours in times they don’t need it—in times they generate more electricity than is otherwise useful. But then again, the sun and wind are endlessly renewable, and the hydrogen storage does trim the land area required under the overall scheme.”

  The commissioner was obviously intrigued with the concept of hyd­rogen generation. “How much hydrogen can you store?”

  The Examiner consulted his notes. “In the North American energy region, about twelve million tons of hydrogen can be put under lid, spread over five hundred underground caverns—primarily depleted natural gas fields. At full storage, this comes to the equivalent of 198,000 gigawatt-hours’ worth of electricity.”

  “What is the grand environmental cost of such a scheme, solar, wind installations, and all?”

  “Some bats and migrating birds die,” stated the Examiner. “But foremost, the cost is the vast expanses of land converted into glorified parking lots for mirrors. Take North America. To provide the United States and the Canadian population with its energy needs (electric cars included) would entail about 225,000 square kilometers. Had all proposed installations been put together, they would’ve covered an area the size of the state of Minnesota.

  “Now, North America has large swaths of land devoted at present to cultivating soybean and maize for feeding cattle and cars. So, in our model, we essentially swapped much of this with energy installations.

  “The sun-drenched deserts may require a smaller footprint, but of course, we didn’t explore setting installations in pristine lands and degrading the Earth surface any further.”

  One of the commissioners asked, “Did you consider running the power grid solely on wind turbines?”

  “Your Grace, given the intermittent and highly variable nature of wind, the power output pattern of wind turbines is extremely erratic. This is the case even when we modeled an array of hundreds of thousands of wind turbines scattered over vast distances and all feeding the power grid.”

  Rafirre went on, “To provide a given region with sufficient energy at every hour of the year relying exclusively on wind turbines requires what for most of the time proves to be an incredible amount of excess generation-capacity. Oftentimes, the generated electricity could exceed the needs of the moment by a factor of three. In concrete terms, it means that to run, for instance, North America on wind would have necessitated 3.6 million wind turbines of 2.5 MW capacity, carpeting an area the equivalent of the entire Midwest—had windy areas of such size existed.”

  “Understood,” said the same commissioner.

  “What about raw materials for the construction of the solar-based setup you’ve outlined?” asked the presiding chair.

  “Silver could be a problem. Merely the amount of silver required for installations worldwide may exceed the entire known reserves.”

  They conferred briefly. “In your assessment, is this scheme politically and economically feasible?”

  “No,” replied Rafirre. “It requires a level of global coordination and an economic paradigm that do not exist on Earth. The fact the world is carved up to numerous fiefdoms, each serving its own narrow self-interest, doesn’t help.”

  One of the commissioners frowned, mulling over the required scope of installations. “What kind of energy consumption do those people have?”

  “For the United States and Canada energy bloc, we assumed about ten-million gigawatt-hours annually.”

  “For only a few hundred million people?”

  “Your Graces, we accounted for the over 10 percent transmission losses from local, existing AC lines. Granted, the figure I just cited is over twice the current consumption amount. Well, we factored in anticipated population growth due to immigration. In our model, we also electrified transportation, heating, and everything else—breaking away from fossil fuel.”

  The commissioner still did not look mollified. “How much of it is for residential energy?”

  “Close to 20 percent.”

  “While most of it is for space heating and cooling, isn’t it?”

  The Examiner nodded.

  “Can’t they cut it down with more energy-efficient buildings?”

  “Well, yes. Perhaps by a factor of ten, as a matter of fact.”

  The commissioners exchanged glances. “A factor of ten,” one of them repeated.

  “It is a combination of construction practices and related technologies.”

  “Have they constructed such houses?”

  “Yes—and for a few decades now. Yet, only a few tens of thousands in total.” They just looked at Rafirre silently. “Your Graces,” he said, “it takes more labor to construct those houses than the more energy-­wasteful alternatives. Well, a little more, at any rate.”

  “So?”

  The Examiner turned to Aratta.

  “Your Graces,” stated Aratta, “their economic setup discourages housing that requires more labor.” He noted their glances. “The public doesn’t care about all this energy-saving stuff if it cost them any. Not really.” He thought for a moment. “Case in point is Masdar city, Abu Dhabi. It was to be a blueprint for the sustainable city of the future. It was to be an international hub for the green tech industry, powered by solar panels and wind tunnels, with a system of driverless electric cars taking the place of mass transit in the first carbon-neutral metropolis in the world.

  “By now, it was supposed to have tens of thousands of residents. Fast forward to reality: sand blows through empty streets. Population: three hundred and some change, that is to say, a handful of security guards and three hundred graduate students, who h
ad been lured by free tuition.

  “Virtue-signaling aside, when it comes down to it, people are not going to seriously sacrifice for the sake of having some carbon-neutral eco-city around. And corporations will allocate only so much money to give their image a green gloss.”

  “Point well taken, Lord Aratta,” said one of the commissioners.

  He turned to the willowy woman. “To change the existing climate trajectory, would the switch to either of those two power-generation schemes suffice?”

  “We think not, Your Grace,” replied the director of the Nature Survey Group. “At this late hour, not only do they have to stop emitting, to the technological extent possible, all greenhouse gases, but also capture much of the crap they have already outgassed and lock it down. And once they do that, the ocean will burp its excess gas, which has come from fossil fuels in the first place. So they will have to draw and lock down that carbon, too. They have taken fossil fuel and released its content; now they have to do it in reverse—hundreds of billions of tons of that stuff.”

  “Can they?”

  “Yes, Your Grace,” she said. “They have some ideas that don’t scale. One does, though: a direct-air capture technology. Absorbent filters exposed to the wind soak up carbon dioxide until the resin reaches a saturation point. Water, or even water vapor, causes a rapid release of their CO₂ content, which is then to be compressed into a liquid.

  “Thirty billion tons of CO₂ each year is a sound rate of capture. The land footprint of such an installation would be about two-hundred and fifty square kilometers. Small. The real land footprint lies elsewhere, with the generation of the needed electricity to operate it. They will need upward of nine million gigawatt-hours’ worth of electricity—the equivalent of almost half of the world’s current usage.”

  “Well then?”

  “Your Graces,” said Rafirre, “this is as unrealistic as either of the two energy-generation schemes we have outlined earlier. The Terraneans are simply not going to do it.

  “Yet, for the record, let me state that under the solar-wind energy scheme I presented, if they run the carbon capture machines over the sunnier seven months of the year, they can work exclusively off the excess of the electricity being generated during those months. There won’t be a need to set up any dedicated power plants to run the carbon dioxide absorbing filters.”