ENERGY CRISIS THE U.S. IS FAST RUNNING OUT OF SOURCES OF POWER

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32959, 4 July 1972, Page 12

ENERGY CRISIS THE U.S. IS FAST RUNNING OUT OF SOURCES OF POWER

(By JAMES BISHOP, jun.. and HEX RY T. SIMMOXS. Xeu-su-eek Feature Service > Most of the crises publicised by the United States Government and the media are viewed by the public largely as abstracts. The gold crisis, the dollar, the balance-of-payments crisis and the Middle East crisis all exist, of course. Yet rarely do they directly affect the average American’s daily life. But now there is a crisis looming that is guaranteed to touch th< lives of millions of Americans and its effects may well l>e felt within the next fews months.

If the summer of 1972

turns out to be a hot one, city dwellers all around the country will routinely turn on lights and switch on air conditioners—only to find that the power they take so completely for granted no longer exists in quantities sufficient to meet their daily needs.

For the United States—once thought to be blessed with a virtually endless supply of nearly every energy source known to man—is slowly but inexorably running out of power. The fuels that have created and maintained the affluent societies of the industrialised world are being diminished at an ever-increasing rate and most experts believe that the practical use of alternative sources of energy •—solar power, for instance, or tapping more of the hazardous power of the atom—is at least several decades away.

Vast cost increase At best, the United States faces a vast increase in the cost of current forms of energy supply; at worst, rationing and a possible cut-back in production. For the energy crisis feeds on itself: the more power the nation uses, the more it finds new, sophisticated uses for power. And these uses, in turn, demand more and more power. Seventy years ago. the United States generated only about 10,000 million million B.T.U.s of energy a year. (A 8.T.U., or British thermal unit, is equivalent to the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit.) Today, the United State’s 120 million motor vehicles, 1200 jet aircraft, 12 million factories and office buildings and 70 million houses together demand some 70,000 million million B.T.U.s a year. To meet that demand, the country consumes 5005 million barrels of oil, 511 million tons of coal, 22 million million cubic feet of natural gas and 1600 tons of fissionable uranium.

And by 1980, it is a safe guess that the annual need will rise to 100,000 million

million B.T.U.s. In thisl decade, the United States alone is expected to burn! 230,000 million barrels of oil —5OOO million more barrels than the whole world has used since oil was first com-j mercially produced in 1895. The result is that by the turn l iof the century, 90 per cent of the world’s oil will have been ! used up. Gas being rationed Natural gas supplies are in even worse shape Gas is an ideal fuel. It is efficient and it bums without giving off any significant pollutant residue. Unfortunately, it is also quite rare—accounting for only 6 per cent of the country’s total fuel reserve. Gas is already being rationed and in some areas gas companies are flatly refusing to sign up new customers. As for fissionable uranium, the U-235 isotope used in current nuclear plants represents only 1 per cent of the world’s total uranium supply. The rest has not so far been proven usable as fuel. And U-235 is being gobbled up so fast that it may become uneconomical within 20 years. But the energy crisis is not simply a matter of supply and demand. It is also the focus of the battle to save the natural environment. There are, for example, quite enough coal reserves—some 750,000 million tons —to last until about the year 2400. But coal is a horrendous environmental villain. It spews out noxious residues of nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide, and fly ash that poison the air and cloud the sky. The most economical way to retrieve coal from the land is by strip-mining, a process that ravages the countryside and leaves barren waste in its wake. Strip-mined land can be reclaimed but proper reclamation costs about SUS2OOO an acre, and altogether nearly 2500 square miles of the United States have already been stripped. Are energyconsumers willing to bear the cost of cleaning up the land that provided them with their fuel? Roots lie deep That question — a question of priorities as well as cost — is one of the most

crucial of the crisis. And its roots lie deep in the htotOfj of the industrial revolution. In the past, says C. Robert Hardesty, executive vicepresident of the Continental Oil Co., “nobody lost any sleep over the fact that competitive circumstances did not permit energy suppliers to price their product for proper land reclamation and the elimination of air and water pollution "Isn’t that how we got into this predicament? Byserving the public’s desires, by feeding its appetite for a prosperity purchased with cheap energy? The American people were buying affluence on margin and their brokers failed to warn them that cheap energy has hidden costs — like polluted air. polluted water, ruptured and abandoned landscapes."

Now that the American people know those costs, they are protesting vehemently — about the inevitable oil spills that will occur if more and more oil is acquired by drilling offshore where much of the world’s supply exists; about water pollution and fish-kills and radiation hazards that are by-products of nuclear power plants. And for the time being, at least, the conflict seems to be insoluble. According to the Secretary of the Interior, Mr C. B. Morton Rogers, the people are saying

"Assure us this energy wi be from secure and reliab sources. But don’t drill of

shore of my coastline, don i strip-mine any coal, don’t build any refineries or storage facilities in my area abolish the oil import pro gramme but don’t move of in by tankers, for this might pollute our waters.”

Meeting two demands

In the short run, the Government is undertaking several measures to meet the demand for both fuel and cleanliness. According to John Quarles, jnr. the Environmental Protection Administration’s chief of enforcement. United States electric utility companies will have to invest between SUSIO.OOO million and SUSIB.OOO million during the next few years for pollutionreduction machinery’. The consumer, of course, will ultimately pay that bill. There are plans afoot to import natural gas from Algeria and hopes to import it from Russia. Oil imports are bound to rise, though at what political and financial cost no-one knows. If, as Joseph Swidler, chairman of the New York State Public Service Commission, estimates, the United State’s daily consumption of oil reaches 28.3 million barrels by 1980, those costs may well be exorbitant. For by then the United States will only be producing about 12 million barrels a day. Sixty per cent of all the oil will have to be imported—a total of 6000 million barrels a year or a full tanker arriving at a United States port every hour. Most of this oil will come from the volatile Middle East and it will cost about SUS2O,OOO million a year. In the next few decades, nuclear fission seems the best answer to the nation’* power needs. There are now 25 operable nuclear power plants in the United States and 52 others are being readied. Conservationists’ objections are gradually being overcome with the installation of new safeguards and cooling towers. Portland (Oregon) General Electric Co., for example, has put some limitations on its Trojan plant on the Columbia River to satisfy environmentalists. Breeder reactors Further in the future lie new nuclear power plants—the so-called "breeder reactors” to which the United States committed itself last year. In an immensely complex process, the breeders use a tiny amount of U-235. plus non-fissile U-238 and fissile plutonium-239 to create more fissionable material than they consume. Environmentalists, however, are not happy with the breeder. For one thing, the plutonium they create is the stuff of atomic bombs For another, opponents take a sceptical view of the Atomic Energy Commission’s avowal that every imaginable safety device will be employed. In the very long run, the modem world’s energy needs will only be met by major technological break-throughs I either in thermonuclear fusjsion or solar power. But at the moment, both fields are ;at the bottom of science fiction.

Harnessing fusion will necessitate a means of containing a nuclear reaction that takes place at 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. A solar power facility, using the sun’s almost infinite energy, would require a plant four miles square. And so for at least a generation. I the United States is simply i going to have to endure the 'energy crisis. i As a member of the I Federal Power Commission jsaid recently, "I think our i energy shortage is not onlv endemic, it’s incurable. We’re ■going to have to live with it for the rest of our lives."