THE breakdown did not come all at once—not like the cataclysmic nightfall that blacked out New York and most of the Northeast in 1965—but it was no less eerie. House lights went out; furnaces sputtered and cooled; auto traffic jammed up at darkened intersections. Dog races were canceled because the electric rabbits would no longer run. Factories shifted to a four-day week, then a three-day week, laying off 1.6 million employees. Only the most essential services operated full time—hospitals, water and sewage plants—and nobody knew how long they could continue.
A scenario for the future? Perhaps.
But it all happened last winter, when Britain’s coal miners went on strike for almost two months. Without coal, there was not enough fuel for electric power plants. Without enough electricity, the nation faltered.
Americans use nearly twice as much electric power per capita as the British and six times as much as the world average. Could such power failures happen here? Early warning signals are everywhere. Says James Lydon, a vice president of Boston Edison Co.: “We have a serious power-supply situation in New England. The consumer can expect voltage reductions this summer.” Similar brownouts are forecast for New York, Virginia, the Carolinas, Florida, Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin. Miami, New York City and Chicago cause “special concern.” When the temperatures rise next month, consumers who keep buying more and more electrical appliances can expect from time to time to find their air conditioners slow, their lights dim, their TV pictures shrink.
The real threat lies in the future.
The U.S. demand for energy is growing at such a rate—doubling every 15 years—that some officials already call it the nation’s most basic economic problem. “A crisis,” says Interior Secretary Rogers C.B. Morton. “Endemic and incurable,” says John A. Carver Jr., vice chairman of the Federal Power Commission. “Sabotage power and you sabotage the future,” warns M. Frederik Smith, a business consultant to the Rockefeller family.
Americans want more gasoline to turn the wheels of their 83 million cars, more kerosene to thrust their jet fleets faster, more coal to fire the boilers of industry, more natural gas to heat their homes in winter, more electricity to cool them in summer. The U.S. now burns up the equivalent of 1.9 billion tons of fossil fuel every year (30% of the world’s consumption) but produces only 1.7 billion tons—and the gap is widening. It must import the rest. Says S. David Freeman, former energy expert for Presidents Johnson and Nixon: “Our rates of consumption are so large that we can see the bottom of the barrel.”
How big is that barrel? Not all the figures are reliable, but experts view it this way:
OIL: In 1970, the U.S. consumed 710 million tons (30% of world consumption), or 15 million bbl. a day. By 1980 it will demand between 20 and 25 million bbl., but U.S. production, now around 10 million, will rise to only 11 million from presently known reserves. In addition, Alaska could provide 2,000,000 bbl. per day if the currently planned (and hotly contested) pipeline is built; newly found offshore deposits could swell output if environmental objections can be met. Even so, industry sources predict that there will be a gap, and to fill it, the U.S. will have to lower its import quotas and buy more oil from Canada, South America, North Africa and the Middle East. Possible cost: about $15 to $20 billion a year, a vast drain on the balance of payments. Aside from cost, foreign supplies are uncertain. Other people like the Europeans and the Japanese want their share too. Already, eleven major oil-producing countries have banded together to bargain for better terms: not only higher prices but more local participation. Last week, Iraq’s governing Revolutionary Council, in a dispute over production quotas, announced the nationalization of the London-based and partly American-owned Iraq Petroleum Co., which provides about 10% of Middle East output. Political disputes bring added risks. Says Colorado Representative Wayne Aspinall, chairman of the House Interior Committee: “I am truly frightened by the potential conflict between pro-Israel sentiment in this country and our increasing reliance on Arab oil. I believe the U.S. is about to be caught in a Middle Eastern power play.”
NATURAL GAS: The U.S. consumed 22.1 trillion cu. ft. last year (49% of the world’s consumption). Proven domestic reserves are down to 247 trillion cu. ft. (from a high of 289 trillion in 1967). Though there is probably a lot more gas to be found in the U.S. and offshore, exploration costs are high, and drillers often have to go two or three miles under the surface to reach new supplies. U.S. gas companies say they cannot even fill current requirements at officially regulated rates, and three major companies have negotiated to buy $10 billion worth of gas from Algeria between now and 1997.
COAL: The U.S. in 1970 burned 530 million tons of its most abundant fuel (known reserves: 2 trillion tons). But coal is also the dirtiest fuel (processes for scrubbing out pollutants will add to costs), and industry leaders argue that they must rely on strip mining, the greatest destroyer of the American countryside. To use other means to get the 254 million tons that were stripped from the earth in 1970 would have cost, they say, an extra $500 million in wages.
Is there a real prospect that the world will run out of its standard fuel resources? Yes, eventually. How much time remains? Nobody can tell for cer tain, but many specialists cite the figures of M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, who predicts that 90% of all oil and gas will be gone by 2035, about 90% of all coal by 2300. Before that doomsday comes, most experts believe, technology can provide alternate sources of power, notably through nuclear energy. In the meantime, however, fuel supplies are al ready becoming scarcer, harder to dig out and thus more expensive. The focal point of this energy crisis—the point at which demand is growing fastest and threatening most immediately to out strip available supplies—is in electric power, which is largely derived from fossil fuels (oil, coal and gas).
Less than a century has passed since Thomas Edison first opened his Pearl Street Station to supply 85 New Yorkers with incandescent light. By 1920 the U.S. was producing 40 billion kw-h of electricity. Today it takes 25% of all its fossil fuels (plus some fissionable uranium) and produces 1.6 quadrillion kwh, or 34% of the world’s output. The largest share of this power (40% ) goes to industry; the rest is split mostly be tween commercial (22%) and residential (34%) uses.
Electric power is a marvelous, inexpensive household genie. But it causes violent and lasting disruption elsewhere. Oil spills at sea, strip mining of coal on land, acid mine drainage into water supplies—these are some of the hazards of extracting fuels from the earth. When the fuel is burned, it is done wastefully; the average plant converts only 35% of fuel into power, and the rest disappears in the form of smoke and heat. The process is dirty. According to Government statistics, electric power plants account for half the sulfur oxides and significant amounts of the nitrogen oxides and soot that contaminate the air.
“Energy demands and environmental goals are on a collision course,” says Energy Expert Freeman. “We’ve got plenty of energy for the present. What we’re running out of is clean energy.” To the dismay of electrical-utility executives, the new environmental laws, added to the older state and local regulations, now require considerable paper work before utilities can even start the new plants they say they must build to prevent future blackouts. The Duke Power Co., for example, recently complained that it had to get 67 different licenses and permits before it could start the Keowee-Toxaway project in South Carolina. Even when the bureaucracy seems willing to provide licenses, environmentalist groups have started suing to stop plant construction, particularly in densely settled areas of the Northeast, the upper Middle West and Southern California. The Sierra Club’s Richard Lahn calls it “guerrilla theater.”
The drama usually centers on two problems:
WHERE TO BUILD A PLANT. “In days gone by,” says Charles Luce, chairman of New York’s Consolidated Edison Co., “communities used to welcome us to get the increase in real estate taxes. Now they don’t.”
Some power companies have sought refuge in the wilderness. A group of 23 Southwestern utilities, for instance, joined in the early 1960s to build a complex of at least six tremendous coal-fired generating stations in a remote and sparsely populated region near the junction of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado. They hoped that cheap coal in the Four Corners area would make up for the cost of long transmission lines to Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and other cities.
But the remoteness of the site did not save the companies from attack. Despite some expensive pollution-abatement equipment, the first two plants to go into operation have been spewing some 1,000 tons of noxious gases and soot per day into the once pellucid desert air. The plants also gulp precious water from the already heavily drained Colorado River system, which supplies most of the arid Southwest. In addition, huge machines have been strip mining 25,000 tons of coal per day from the area, gashing open the Hopi and Navajo Indians’ sacred Black Mesa plateau in New Mexico. The project thus poses some hard questions: Is it fair to drain the resources of one region to satisfy the demands of faraway cities? Is pollution any more acceptable if it is inflicted on politically powerless minorities? Or on some of America’s wide-open spaces?
HOW TO REDUCE POLLUTION. All power pollutes, but not equally. In one recent survey of 129 major electric plants, the Council on Economic Priorities found that most utilities have been slow to install proven antipollution devices even though they are readily available. The main reason, of course, is a concern over higher costs when rates are regulated.
Consider thermal pollution, which occurs when electric plants take water to cool steam-filled condensers and then return it, 10° or 20° hotter. On such little-known battlefields as Calvert Cliffs, Md., Turkey Point, Fla., Palisades, Mich., and Dresden, Ill., environmental and government bodies combined to force the utilities to build some expensive systems (artificial lakes, huge fan towers) to cool their plants’ discharges.
Perhaps the most notable fight against the polluting effects of power plants occurred in Minneapolis and St. Paul, where citizens heard that the Northern States Power Co.’s nuclear plant upstream on the Mississippi would leak traces of low-level radioactive wastes into their drinking waters. Thousands of mothers and children marched on the N.S.P. offices, customers sent the utility dimes “for cleaning up,” and bumper stickers said, LEUKEMIA is PENNY CHEAP FROM N.S.P. The utility subsequently installed filters and other devices to minimize the hazard. The company also set up a “task force” of 40 private citizens to join in planning for future plant construction.
However understandable such environmental crusades may be, and however remiss the utilities may seem in retrospect, the battles hamper power production at the very time of the growing shortage. Under the Clean Air Act of 1970, the utilities will have to meet tough air-quality standards by 1975, and the cost of those standards will help to triple the price of electricity by 1990. Nonetheless, the Federal Power Commission predicts that the utilities must build about 300 new power plants generating 910 million kw. to meet the anticipated needs of 1990. The expected cost: $500 billion.
Surveying their problems, the utilities have drawn one inescapable conclusion: they are “going nuclear.” The building costs are huge, but operating costs are low, and an adequate U.S. supply of enriched uranium fuel is assured. The Atomic Energy Commission has al ready approved plans for 51 plants, now being built, and 61 more that are ready for construction. Nuclear power today provides only 2% of U.S. needs, but it may well supply more than 50% by 1990. Here too, however, environmental problems are restricting expansion.
So far, numerous lawsuits have blocked nuclear construction, for many Americans still have a visceral fear of an accidental atomic explosion (which is impossible) or of what Alaska Senator Mike Gravel calls “the ultimate pollutant”—lethal, long-lived radiation.
Partly in response to such fears, the AEC has insisted on extensive safety precautions. Before the Portland General Electric Co. could start building its Trojan reactor on the Columbia River, for example, it had to choose a site that would remain safe during an almost inconceivable catastrophe: the simultaneous bursting of the Grand Coulee Dam upstream plus the largest natural flood that had occurred in the area during 10,000 years.
Skeptics, including many distinguished scientists, remain unconvinced that every precaution has been taken. During a reactor’s operation, the worst possible contingency is the uncontrolled melting of its nuclear core. To preclude such an occurrence, which the AEC calls “the maximum credible accident,” the core is continually bathed in cooling water; the AEC even requires an emergency set of pipes and valves to continue supplying the water if one set is severed. Unfortunately, simulated tests by the AEC itself have shown that the reserve pipes, the “emergency core cooling system” (ECCS), may also fail. What would happen if the cooling system breaks down? M.I.T. Nuclear Physicist Hugh Kendall paints a lurid picture. The nuclear core would become a molten mass, so hot that it could melt through anything guarding it. Subsequent steam explosions could rupture the outer container, releasing a cloud of radioactivity about two miles wide and 60 miles long. Much of the population in that area would be dead within two weeks.
Kendall and other critical scientists are quick to add that there is very little chance of such a catastrophe actually happening, but even the bare possibility makes them oppose going ahead with the nuclear program until the cooling problem is totally solved. Conceding the point, the AEC is holding open hearings on nuclear safety in Bethesda, Md. In the meantime, it has allowed only one new nuclear plant to go into operation in the past 17 months.
Breeders. Despite the unknown risks, the Government and the utilities are clearly betting on nuclear power for decades to come, and Congress last month voted to give the builders of nuclear plants an 18-month exemption from having to make environmental reports on the plants’ effects. Looking ahead. President Nixon has committed the U.S. to developing a new and still untried generation of nuclear reactors, now receiving the bulk of the U.S. energy research budget ($260 million). Nixon told Congress last year: “Our best hope today for meeting the nation’s growing demand for clean energy lies with the fast-breeder reactor.”
The fast breeder seems to be a miraculous machine indeed. It produces slightly more fuel than it consumes, thus extending fuel supplies for centuries.* It wastes less heat energy than any other kind of power plant available today, and it seems technically feasible (though the biggest prototype partially melted in 1966). The AEC aims to have a $500 million demonstration plant operating by 1980, probably in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s network. Says AEC Chairman James Schlesinger, who took over the agency a year ago: “If we don’t have breeder technology in the 1990s, the regrets could be very great indeed.” But he admits that there are still “uncertainties” to be worked out.
“The breeder is a monster,” says David Comey, environmental director for Chicago’s Businessmen in the Public Interest. Nuclear Pioneer George Weil agrees, calling the breeder concept “dangerous and unproved.” Some objections focus on the use of liquid sodium (a tricky substance that explodes on contact with water and burns in air) as a cooling medium. Others concern the fuel, plutonium, the basic ingredient of the hydrogen bomb and one of the deadliest substances known. Finally, the critics wonder how to get rid of radioactive wastes from any nuclear reactor, some of which remain lethal for 500,000 years. At present, the AEC plans to store them in large concrete containers at an as yet unspecified location. Then they must be watched (and watched). “We are committing future generations,” reported a British commission last month, “to a problem that we do not know how to handle.”
Given the drawbacks to each type of energy, scientists, politicians and conservationists are all seeking alternative sources for the power needed in the next century. Some possibilities:
FUSION. The ideal solution is to reproduce the sun’s own process of joining atomic nuclei to produce clean, safe energy. The process, which also powers the hydrogen bomb, releases so much energy, and the hydrogen used as fuel is so abundant in sea water, that fusion could fill the world’s electricity needs for millions of years. But the practical difficulties of confining nuclear particles in “bottles” of magnetic energy (at temperatures approaching 60 million degrees F.) are such that most experts do not foresee fusion working before 1990 at the earliest.
THE EARTH’S HEAT. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. operates the U.S.’s only geothermal plant, at the Geysers in California’s Sonoma Valley. There, the engineers capture sulfurous, superheated steam hissing from natural vents and drilled wells in the earth’s surface and use it to drive turbines. There is some question whether such techniques would work where there are no natural vents. The Los Alamos National Laboratory is now trying to exploit the dry, hot (600° F.) granite that underlies most of the earth. Scientists plan to sink two holes 15,000 ft. deep, then pump cold water down one well and let hot steam flow up the other. If successful, the dry-rock system might provide, says one scientist, “all the electricity America will need for the next 3,000 years.”
SUNSHINE. Theoretically, the sun’s energy ought to be usable, but no one is sure how best to collect sunshine and transform it into power. In answer, Aden and Marjorie Meinel of the University of Arizona have proposed a “solar farm” that would cover 5,500 sq. mi. of desert with rows of black steel bands. These would absorb the sun’s heat and send it to large storage “batteries” of molten salt, which would power turbine generators. Cost of building a 3,000-kw. demonstration plant: $10 million. Despite the amount of land that such projects would take, most scientists agree that, given research funds, solar power will be economical and efficient in the not-too-distant future.
OTHERS. Windmills have long provided limited power in the flat, open countryside, and the wind’s force could also be tapped from tall towers anywhere. The big problem, again, is how to store the energy from this variable source. Other proven possibilities include harnessing the oceans’ tides (a limited possibility at best), burning garbage as a low-grade fuel and, strangest of all, combining animal manure and carbon monoxide under heat and pressure to produce oil. Government researchers reckon that they can get three barrels of oil from every ton of manure, but the costs of collecting the stuff and hauling it to a plant may prove prohibitive.
“We should be spending $2 billion a year on research into the alternatives, not $600 million,” says Energy Consultant Freeman. “We’re going into the future with only one arrow for our bow, the breeder. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll face a real crisis.” Actually, the utilities have already proposed various surcharges that would raise some $400 million a year entirely for future research.
Russell Train, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, believes that the U.S. can at least start lessening its energy problem right now by reducing waste. “We must shift our thinking from simply finding more energy sources to concerning ourselves with how to use energy more efficiently,” he says. With better technology, most appliances can be made to consume less power and throw off less heat. The common light bulb uses only 10% of the electricity it burns, for example, and refrigerators can easily be produced to use 50% less power. More important, there is plenty of room for improvement in methods of generating and transmitting electricity. One remedy is an advanced but until recently neglected system with the awesome name of magnetohydrodynamics. MHD can produce electricity directly from the high-velocity flow of hot, ionized gases, with 60% efficiency instead of the present 35%. Similarly, superconductive, supercold (–320° F.) power lines can cut transmission losses. Though both technologies are costly, they would yield much more power per unit of fuel with less pollution.
The basic problem, though, is the soaring increase in future demand, which must somehow be slowed. Some utilities are already shifting their advertising campaigns from consumption to conservation of electricity. The rate-setting state power commissions might stop favoring large consumers, who claim the traditional discounts for bulk buying. (In Virginia, for example, the average industrial user pays 10 per kw-h for buying in bulk; the residential user pays 20, and the very small user, i.e., the poor, pays 30.) If the price of power must equal its costs, including the costs of environmental cleanup, then it seems reasonable that everyone pay equally.
Simply increasing the price of power could be expected eventually to reduce consumption. But even that straightforward tactic raises a difficult question. Since energy consumption and pollution have long been an element of the nation’s prosperity, can we now conserve and clean up only by making life more expensive for everybody, including the poor? “Any effort to find a solution to the power crisis is certain to engage, at the deepest level, the nation’s concept of social justice,” says Biologist Barry Commoner. “The power crisis, like every other environmental issue, is not an escape from the responsibilities of social justice. It is, rather, a new way of perceiving them.”
In response, however, the conservationist argument is that the public hardly benefits from office lights that burn all night, from the sealed glass buildings whose overworked air conditioners heat up the streets, or from the trash heaps that could be recycled into new products. Commoner, for one, estimates that a number of relatively simple changes like improved insulation in private homes, or the use of more steel and less aluminum in new cars, would make it possible to reduce present energy consumption by one-third.
These may seem like sacrifices to those who have become habituated to waste, but they are small sacrifices when, as Maurice Chevalier said of old age, “you consider the alternative.”
* The original fuel (fissionable uranium 235, or plutonium) is surrounded by a “blanket” of nonfissionable uranium 238, which absorbs neutrons from the chain reaction in the core. These neutrons transmute the U-238 in the blanket into plutonium, which can fuel another breeder.
