The biofuel hoax is causing a world food crisis!

As our politicians drill the human food supply for energy

by Christopher Calder

     It is a mathematically provable fact that you cannot replace oil, coal, and natural gas with windmills, solar panels, and biofuels.  Hobbits may be able to live poetically, generating energy from the wind, the sun, and the soil.  Real human beings living in an industrialized civilization need highly concentrated nonrenewable energy sources to survive.  Renewable energy schemes other than traditional hydroelectric power are resource hogs that take up huge amounts of space while providing very little usable energy in return.  Contrary to popular belief, solar, wind, wave energy, and biofuel schemes are not "energy efficient," and their ultra-high cost is an accurate measurement of that inherent inefficiency.  If they were efficient, they would cost less than using fossil fuels, not dramatically more than using fossil fuels.

EXAMPLE:  To satisfy 100% of New York City's electricity needs with wind power would require impossible around-the-clock winds within a limited speed range, and a wind farm the size of the entire state of Connecticut.  Solar photovoltaic cells are so inefficient that it would take about 60 square miles of expensive solar panels to generate just one gigawatt of electricity.  [Statistical source - Scientist Jesse H. Ausubel, Director of the Program for the Human Environment, and author of "Renewable and nuclear heresies."]  Fortunately, there is an affordable, carbon free energy solution, which is described in detail near the bottom of this web page.  But first, let's analyze the energy solutions that don't work, and which cause much more harm than good.

     According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, global food prices rose an incredible 40% in 2007.  The World Bank states that the cost of staple foods rose by 83% during the 3 year period from 2005 to 2008.  The International Food Policy Research Institute states that biofuels are responsible for rapid grain price inflation, and a detailed analysis by Don Mitchell, an internationally respected economist at the World Bank, stated that biofuels have forced global staple food prices up by 75%.

     The United Nations states that its charity programs can no longer afford to feed the starving peoples of the world because of the high cost of staple foods.  Mr. Jean Ziegler, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, repeatedly denounced biofuels as "a crime against humanity."  The new UN food envoy, Mr. Olivier De Schuster, has called for United States and European Union biofuel targets to be abandoned, and said the world food crisis is "a silent tsunami affecting 100 million people."  Oil price increases have not shrunk the human food supply, but biofuel production has.  The more biofuels we produce, the less food we have to eat, because we grow biofuel crops using the same land, water, fertilizer, farm equipment, and labor we use to grow food.

Ten reasons to oppose biofuels

1)  Starvation - Any force, such as worldwide biofuel production or oil price hikes, that significantly raises food prices also raises the number of human deaths due to malnutrition.  It is difficult for us to control the price of oil, but it is easy for us to control our own biofuel production; we just stop doing it!  The one-two punch of biofuels crowding out food production and high oil prices raising the cost of almost everything is a deadly blow to the poor on a planetary scale.

     No one knows exactly how many millions of people biofuel production has killed.  We do know that biofuels are a global disaster worse than Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” five year plan, which is estimated to have killed between 14 and 40 million Chinese through starvation and related illness.  Mao’s Great Leap Forward idea killed that many people through relatively modest decreases in food production in China alone.  Mao banned private farms in 1958 in his shift to communes and greater industrial output at the expense of agriculture.  This led to a 15% drop in grain production in China in 1959, and another 10% reduction in 1960.  The biofuel disaster is a vastly larger event that has displaced food production in the U.S.A., Canada, Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, Australia, and in many small island nations.  Biofuels have been produced for many years, and the diversion of agricultural resources to feeding cars instead of people has been enormous and is ongoing. 

2)  Higher cost - Biofuels increase our federal budget deficit because they depend on large subsidies just to exist.  Without government subsidies and mandates, there would be no significant free market demand for biofuels in the United States.  Subsidies for ethanol were more than 60 times those for gasoline in the year 2006.  Ethanol contains 33% less energy than gasoline, so it takes 15 gallons of pure ethanol to travel the same number of miles that could be traveled using just 10 gallons of regular unleaded gasoline.  Our politicians have effectively mandated that we all get lower gas mileage at a time we are paying record high prices at the pump.  Ethanol fuel always contains small amounts of water and absorbs even more water from the atmosphere unless stored in tightly sealed containers.  This means ethanol cannot be pumped through existing gasoline pipelines due to rust and corrosion problems.  Ethanol is destructive to the fuel systems of boats and corrodes fiberglass gas tanks.  Both ethanol and biodiesel increase engine maintenance costs and lower engine reliability, a particularly significant issue for light aircraft owners.

     William Jaeger, an Oregon State University agricultural economist, found that to achieve a given improvement in energy independence using ethanol from corn, biodiesel from rapeseed (canola oil), and ethanol from wood-based cellulose at maximum estimated scales of production in Oregon would lead to a net energy gain of just two-thirds of one percent of Oregon’s annual energy use.  None of the biofuels were found to be marketable without large taxpayer subsidies, and the much hyped cellulosic ethanol was found to be the most expensive of all the biofuels to produce.  [See Biofuel Potential in Oregon 532KB study PDF]  Jaeger stated that "Given currently available technologies, it is difficult to see the net contribution of biofuels rising above 1% of our current fossil fuel energy consumption – for either Oregon or the U.S." - From Biofuels in Oregon from an Economic and Policy Perspective (240KB PDF)

     To calculate the true cost of biofuels, you must add together all of their negatives: the high direct cost of producing the fuel, increased cost of food worldwide, loss of water used for irrigation, mechanical damage done to vehicles that use biofuels, and damage done to the environment itself.  Judged in total, biofuels are tremendously more expensive than using gasoline and diesel fuel made from oil.  Economist Ronald Cooke estimated that production and food penalty costs of ethanol totaled about $6.89 a gallon back in February, 2007, before recent spectacular corn price rises.  Global biofuel production has also raised the cost of farmland all over the world, which has increased pressure on food prices everywhere.  

3)  Environmental damage - When you try to grow both fuel and food at the same time, you greatly increase the rate of topsoil erosion, because disturbing the land by tilling and harvesting makes soils vulnerable to wind and rain.  Globally, topsoil is being lost ten times faster than it is being replenished, and 30% of the world's arable land has become unproductive in the past 40 years due to erosion.  The human race would quickly starve to death without topsoil, and the USA is in serious jeopardy of losing adequate food growing capacity within 100 years or less due to erosion.  Biofuel production is helping clog the Mississippi and other rivers with topsoil from our prime growing areas.  In 1850, Iowa prairie soils had about 12-16 inches of topsoil, but now have only about 6-8 inches.  We are continuing to lose Iowa topsoil at a rate of approximately 30 tons of topsoil per hectare (10,000 square meters) per year.  As it takes nature hundreds of years to replace just 1 inch of lost topsoil, ask biofuel advocates if helping to destroy the ability of future generations to grow food is a worthy environmental goal.

     Biofuel production also harms the environment by encouraging the destruction of forests, which are needed to soak up excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the major greenhouse gas that is blamed for global warming, and the two great sponges of carbon dioxide are the oceans and the forests.  The oceans are losing their ability to absorb CO2 as they are becoming increasingly acidic due to pollution, so if we also destroy our forests greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere will increase.  If the global warming theory is true, use of biofuels will dramatically speed up global warming because the entire biofuel production process, from beginning to end, releases huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while destroying native forests which naturally clean and rejuvenate the air we breathe.

     Biofuel production transports carbon into the atmosphere that was previously sequestered (trapped) in soils and native vegetation.  In gaseous form these carbon based molecules, such as carbon dioxide and methane, act as an automobile windshield and hold in heat gained from solar radiation.  It has been reported that in 2009 Indonesia became the world's third largest emitter of carbon dioxide, in large part due to deforestation caused by ever expanding biofuel farming.  The journal SCIENCE published the Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change, which states that the production of biofuels from grains or switchgrass greatly increases the release of greenhouse gases and is far worse for the environment than using gasoline.  The authors found that "Using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land use change, corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years.  Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%."

     Scientists point out that nitrogen fertilizers, which are made from natural gas, coal, and mined minerals, react with soil to unleash large amounts of nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas estimated to be 296 times more effective at trapping the earth's heat than CO2.  According to the study, N2O release from agro-biofuel production (newspaper story, 274KB study PDF), rapeseed biodiesel and corn-ethanol production unleashes more greenhouse gas than using fossil fuels.  "Biodiesel from rapeseed and bioethanol from corn, depending on N fertilizer uptake efficiency by the plants, can contribute as much or more to global warming by N2O emissions than cooling by fossil fuel savings."  Dr. Dave Reay, of the University of Edinburgh, used the findings to estimate that U.S. plans to expand corn-ethanol production through the year 2022 will increase greenhouse gas emissions from transportation by 6%, not including the large additional greenhouse gas release due to land use changes.  Farming contributes more to global warming each year than all land, sea, and air transportation combined, so growing vast amounts of biofuel crops will heat up the earth's atmosphere faster than if we only used imported oil.

     Biofuel advocates ignore the fact that when we pump up grain prices through biofuel production, we raise grain prices all over the world, which gives other countries a strong financial incentive to burn down more rainforests in order to plant more food.  United States corn-ethanol production is a major driving force in the rapid destruction of the Amazon basin.  [newspaper story with pictures]  A recent Stanford University study confirms biofuel production speeds destruction of tropical forests.  [more details]  "We can't find a way that it makes greenhouse gas sense to grow ethanol in the United States," says Holly Gibbs of Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment.

     A 2008 study found that corn-ethanol biofuel production will cause a 10 to 34% increase in nitrogen pollution in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers due to fertilizer run-off, thus increasing the size of the DEAD ZONE in the Gulf of Mexico.  [study abstract]  Biofuels production also dramatically increases the use of fossil fuel derived insecticides, which are blamed for killing frogs and bees, and causing neurological damage in humans.  A growing number of scientists claim insecticides are causing the feminization of male fish, reptiles, and human beings exposed to an ever increasing load of endocrine system distorting insecticides.  Jatropha, the biofuel crop being promoted in tropical countries, is effectively a giant toxic monster weed, which will have a destructive impact on wildlife and biodiversity, and will be almost impossible to get rid of once planted, thus destroying the future farming potential of the land.  [See Jatropha and Land Grab, an Indian website on destruction to native people and the environment caused by biofuel production.  Also see Biofuels: an unfolding disaster (514KB study PDF)]

4)  Water shortages - Biofuel crop production causes water shortages because irrigation water is taken away from our shrinking supplies of safe drinking and agricultural water.  There is not enough salt free water in the world to grow biofuel crops and still provide essential utility water for our homes, and to grow sufficient food for humans to survive.  It takes 9,000 gallons of water to produce just 1 gallon of biodiesel made from soybeans, so we need to save our very limited supplies of ground water to grow food, not fuel.  Even without biofuel production we are turning vast areas of land into desert every year through loss of topsoil due to farming for essential food.  

5)  It's a lie - The Barack Obama "biofuel energy independence plan" is a scientific hoax and an economic fraud because current United States biofuel production methods use so much energy to create biofuels that they are simply not worth the effort.  Biofuel advocates often distort energy efficiency calculations by leaving out essential energy inputs required to make fuel.  The average American does not understand that when you pour nitrogen fertilizers on crops, you are literally pouring on fossil fuel energy.  Nitrogen fertilizers are so full of chemical energy potential that they are used to make explosives, so when you grow biofuels only part of the plant's energy accumulation comes from sunlight, and the rest comes from the fossil energy we feed them.  Rather than use natural gas to make fertilizer to grow biofuel crops, it would be more efficient to alter our cars to run on the natural gas directly.

     "The following are the major energy inputs to industrial corn farming: nitrogen fertilizer (all fossil energy), phosphate, potash and lime (mostly fossil energy), herbicides and insecticides (all fossil energy), fossil fuels used = diesel, gasoline, liquefied petroleum gas and natural gas, electricity (almost all fossil energy), transportation (all fossil energy), corn seeds and irrigation (mostly fossil energy), infrastructure (mostly fossil energy), labor (mostly fossil energy).  Corn produced at a large expense of fossil energy is then transformed, with even more fossil energy, into pure ethanol." -  Tad W. Patzek, Thermodynamics of the Corn-Ethanol Biofuel Cycle  [833KB study PDF]

     Politicians hope that second generation biofuel crops will generate more energy at greater efficiency, but those schemes have yet to be proven in the real world.  See the dismal energy efficiency calculations for the Mass and energy balances of the switchgrass-ethanol cycle (252KB study PDF), provided by Professor Tad W. Patzek.  Professor David Pimentel states that"Cellulosic ethanol is touted as the replacement for corn ethanol.  Unfortunately, cellulosic biomass contains less than 1/3rd the amount of starches and sugars in corn and requires major fossil energy inputs to release the tightly bound starches and sugars for ethanol conversion.  About 170% more energy (oil and gas) is required to produce ethanol from cellulosic biomass than the ethanol produced."

     Biofuel advocates falsely claim that ethanol is a "clean fuel" that will reduce air pollution.  Ethanol blended fuels burn cleaner on a per gallon basis, but not on a miles traveled basis because ethanol contains 33% less energy than gasoline.  Ethanol blended fuels actually emit more CO2 per miles driven than ordinary gasoline in addition to emitting more CO2 during their manufacture.  According to the Environmental Protection Agency, ethanol increases the production of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) by 4 to 7% over gasoline, and emits acetaldehyde, a probable carcinogen.

7)  The outlook for biofuels is dismal - All present and future biofuels have the same problems.  Biofuel crops are all too low in energy, too light in weight, and thus too bulky and expensive to transport to be of any real value.  Biofuels require too much land, water, and fertilizer resources to be beneficial.  By contrast, dirty old coal, which we need to replace as an energy source, has been historically successful as a fuel because it is very heavy and compact, high in energy content, and thus makes energy sense to transport.  Coal already exists in the ground so you don't have to plant it, water it, and fertilize it.  All biofuel schemes, planned or imagined, will never amount to a hill of beans because of the basic limitations of their solar based production process.  A requirement for vast amounts of sunlight will always equal a requirement for vast amounts of land area to collect that sunlight, thus solar power schemes can never replace the massive concentrated energy reservoir of fossil fuels.

     Growing switchgrass to produce ethanol from lignocellulose has most of the same drawbacks as making ethanol from corn.  We will use land, water, fertilizer, farm equipment, and labor to grow switchgrass that will be diverted from food production, with soaring food prices the result.  If we grow switchgrass on land currently used to graze cattle, we will reduce beef and milk production.  If we grow switchgrass on unused "marginal" prairie lands, we will soon turn those marginal lands into a new dust bowl, which they may turn into anyway due to global warming.  Computer models for the progression of global warming show the America Midwest and Southwest getting hotter and dryer, with much of our farm and grazing land turning into desert.  We know that biofuel production will speed up greenhouse gas release, so if the global warming theory is true, we soon won't be able to produce enough biofuels to run our cars, or enough food to fill our bellies.       

     Switchgrass and other biofuel weeds will be grown by ordinary, profit motive driven farmers, not by environmentally trained scientists.  Farmers will grow switchgrass on land that could be used to grow corn, wheat, or soybeans, and farmers will want to maximize yield so they will use lots of fertilizer to increase output.  The plans biofuel idealists are trying to sell the American public will never produce the kind of "green," food friendly energy resource they promise.  The next great scandal will be how to get rid of all the millions of acres of invasive, deep rooted biofuel weeds once society inevitably realizes that even growing second generation biofuel crops is a tragic mistake. 

     In practical terms, there is not enough usable land area to grow a sufficient quantity of biofuel plants to meet the world's energy demands.  According to professors James Jordan and James Powell, "Allowing a net positive energy output of 30,000 British thermal units (Btu) per gallon, it would still take four gallons of ethanol from corn to equal one gallon of gasoline.  The United States has 73 million acres of corn cropland.  At 350 gallons per acre, the entire U.S. corn crop would make 25.5 billion gallons, equivalent to about 6.3 billion gallons of gasoline.  The United States consumes 170 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel annually.  Thus the entire U.S. corn crop would supply only 3.7% of our auto and truck transport demands.  Using the entire 300 million acres of U.S. cropland for corn-based ethanol production would meet about 15% of the demand."  [See The False Hope of Biofuels]

     Growing algae to make biodiesel is being touted as a cure-all for all our biofuel problems, but we are still stuck with the fact that algae need solar energy to turn carbon dioxide into fuel.  To make biodiesel, algae are used as organic solar panels which output oil instead of electricity.  Researchers brag that algae can produce 15 times more fuel per acre of land than growing corn for ethanol, but that still means we would need an impossibly large number of acres (about 133 million acres) of concrete lined open-air algae ponds to meet our highway energy demands.  Those schemes that grow algae in closed reactor vessels, without sunlight, necessitate the algae being fed sugars or starches as a source of chemical energy.  The sugars or starches must then be made from corn, wheat, beets, or other crop, so you are simply trading ethanol potential to make oil instead of vodka.  If we construct genetically engineered super-algae that are capable of out-competing native algae strains that contaminate open air algae ponds, the new gene-modified algae will be immediately carried to lakes, reservoirs, and oceans all over the world in the feathers of migrating birds, with unknown and possibly catastrophic results.

     If we try to guard algae from contamination by growing them in sealed containers under glass or in plastic tubes, the construction costs for building large enough areas to collect sufficient sunlight would be prohibitive.  Even then the containers are still subject to contamination over time, and must be periodically flushed and rinsed with chlorine or other caustic agent.  The current cost of biodiesel made from algae is about $14.00 a gallon.

     Using "agricultural waste" to make biofuels has its own problems.  [See soil report]  Removing unused portions of plants that are normally plowed under increases the need for nitrogen fertilizers, which release the most potent greenhouse gas of all, nitrous oxide.  Residual post-harvest crop biomass must be returned to the soil to maintain topsoil integrity, otherwise the rate of topsoil erosion increases dramatically.  If we mine our topsoil for energy we will end up committing slow agricultural suicide like the Mayan Empire.  [See Food Versus Biofuels: Environmental and Economic Costs, by Professor David Pimentel]

     Using wood chips to make ethanol or biodiesel sounds like a good idea until you remember that we currently use wood chips to make fuel pellets for stoves, paper, particle board, and a thousand and one building products.  The idea of sending teams of manual laborers into forests to salvage underbrush for fuel would be prohibitively expensive.  Our forests are already stressed just producing lumber without tasking them with producing liquid biofuels for automobiles.  Such schemes would inevitably drive up the price of everything made from wood, creating yet another resource crisis.  Making fuel from true garbage, such as used cooking oil and winery waste, is environmentally harmless, but is it really worth the large infrastructure and vehicle maintenance costs required to sell ethanol and biodiesel as fuels?  Our usable true waste resources are very limited in quantity, and not a major energy solution for a nation that uses over 8 billion barrels of crude oil every year. 

On biofuel advocates: “You have money and media access, and now everybody believes that two plus two equals twenty-two.” - Tad W. Patzek, professor of geoengineering at the University of Texas in Austin, and formerly of UC Berkeley 

"Every day more than 16,000* children die from hunger-related causes -- one child every five seconds.  The situation will only get worse.  It would be morally wrong to divert cropland needed for human food supply to powering automobiles.  It would also deplete soil fertility and the long-term capability to maintain food production.  We would destroy the farmland that our grandchildren and their grandchildren will need to live." - Professors James Jordan and James Powell, Maglev Research Center at Polytechnic University of New York  [*2009 statistics estimate approximately 20,000 children die from hunger-related causes every day]

9)  It's a strategic national security disaster - In the years before biofuel production, the United States had large food reserves kept in storage due to the excess bounty created by modern agricultural technology.  Those days are long gone, and global food reserves are now at historic lows.  In earth's history there have always been great natural disasters that periodically cause poor crop harvests, such as crop diseases, insect plagues, droughts, floods, impacts of asteroids and comets, and volcanic eruptions that throw up so much dust and noxious gas into the atmosphere that sunlight is reduced for a year or longer.  The eruption of the island of Krakatau in 1883 produced a 1.2 degree Celsius global temperature decline that did not return to normal until 1888, and caused poor crop harvests all over the world.

     There are mammoth volcanoes all over the world, from Iceland, to Asia, to South America, to Yellowstone Park, which are capable of having devastating effects on our atmosphere and thus our food production.  By using agriculture to produce energy for both transportation and human caloric intake, we have eliminated our strategic cushion of food reserves.  When global disaster inevitably strikes again, starvation will set in quickly because of government biofuel mandates.  If we use nonagricultural energy sources for producing fuel for transportation, specifically nuclear and geothermal energy, we will not suffer the double systemic insult of food and fuel shortages.  Large scale biofuel production, which depends on normal climactic conditions to grow crops, is a severe threat to our national security.

10)  It's a mathematical impossibility - It has been estimated that every year the human race burns the fossilized remnants of approximately 400 years worth of total planetary vegetation in the condensed form of fossil fuels: coal, oil, natural gas, etc.  "The fossil fuels burned in 1997 were created from organic matter containing 44 × 1018 g C, which is >400 times the net primary productivity (NPP) of the planet’s current biota."  This quote comes from Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption of Ancient Solar Energy, by Professor Jeffrey S. Dukes of the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University.  His figures makes sense if you remember that the earth is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old, and you consider the rapid rate at which human beings are burning up fossil fuels.  Dukes estimated that it would take approximately 22% of all current above ground plant growth on land to replace fossil fuels for the year 1997 in terms of raw energy potential, a number that is now out of date due to increased fossil fuel use.  The old 22% estimate also does not account for the tremendous energy expenditures required to transform food derived and cellulose derived biomass into usable liquid fuel.  As the United States uses a disproportionally large percentage of the world's fossil fuels every year, the amount of U.S. land biomass we would have to convert to ethanol would be impossibly high.  No park or backyard would be safe from the biofuel harvesters.

     "All sources of renewable liquid energy are inadequate when set against the net energy density that is achieved from extracting oil from wells, which we estimate as being the equivalent of capturing all 10,000 parts in 10,000 of insolation (incident solar radiation), or even from producing synthetic gasoline from coal — equivalent to capturing 2200 parts in 10,000 of insolation.  3 parts per 10,000 is a pale shadow of the fossil fuel net energy densities which have been the sine qua non of the 4400 million population growth in the last century." - Andrew R.B. Ferguson, editor Optimum Population Trust Journal  [see article]

1)  You don't get any solar energy at night; you get less on cloudy days, less in the morning, and less in the late afternoon.  That makes large scale solar  power schemes horribly inefficient no matter how high we can pump up the theoretical peak output of solar panels.  The cost of energy storage systems, batteries and other complex systems on top of high panel costs makes solar impossibly expensive for large scale use.  We need synthetic liquid fuels to run farm equipment, cars, trucks, ships, airplanes, etc., and to make synthetic fertilizers.  We can manufacture these fuels with solar power, but at many times the cost of using nuclear power.  You have to run synthetic fuel plants 24 hours a day to be economically viable.  If you must use fossil fuel or nuclear reactor backup power at night to keep a synthetic fuel plant running, then why bother to have solar power at all?  Duplication of energy resources is a needless expense.  Any power plant must output power 24-7 to be economically valuable for large scale use. 

2)  The surface area of the earth we would need to cover with solar panels to collect significant amounts of energy makes it impossible on a practical economic and human level.  Solar advocates have suggested that we could satisfy 69% of United States daytime electricity needs for the year 2050 by covering 34,000 square miles of our Southwestern desert with solar panels, thus turning it into a vast DEAD ZONE.  It will never happen.

3)  Solar panels will always be exposed to the weather, and their lifespan is short, about 25 years.  Unlike other power systems, solar panels cannot be repaired and upgraded to extend their useful life beyond their limited lifespan.  This fact dramatically increases their cost per kilowatt hour compared to other more affordable alternatives.  Who will guard solar panel installations covering millions of acres?  Solar panel theft is a big problem in California right now.  Giant solar ovens using mirrors are less likely to be targets of theft and are less expensive on a BTU/watts collected basis, but the land area required to produce significant amounts of energy makes them a joke.  Solar power is great for running pocket calculators, remote vacation cabins, and other small scale HIGH COST per watt uses, but solar power is inherently the wrong choice for large scale power grid use.  

4)  As William Tucker points out in Food Riots Made in the USA, solar power is an extraterrestrial nuclear power system where the nuclear reactor is located 93 million miles away from us in outer space,...the sun.  We need terrestrial nuclear reactors right here on earth so we can affordably capture their HIGHLY CONCENTRATED energy without taking up huge amounts of land space.  Our extraterrestrial nuclear power source is great for growing crops, but its output is far too diffuse and intermittent for practical large scale electricity production.

     Economist Michael J. Trebilcock studied wind power and found that Wind power is a complete disaster.  He points out that the United States Government subsidizes wind power at a rate of $23.34 per MWh compared to just $.25 for natural gas, $.44 for coal, $.67 for hydroelectric power, and $1.59 for nuclear power (2008 EIA statistics).  Trebilcock discovered that Denmark has over 6,000 wind turbines that supplement its energy grid, but has not been able to close even a single fossil fuel power plant as a result, because extra fossil energy is needed when the wind stops blowing.  In 2006 carbon dioxide emissions in Denmark rose by a whopping 36%, showing that large scale wind power projects do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions in real-world situations.  Because of wind power, Denmark now has the highest electricity rates in Europe.  A recent study of Spain's energy program found that for every job created by state funded wind power schemes, 2.2 jobs were lost due to higher energy costs, and each new wind power job cost almost $2,000,000. in government subsidies.  To meet 100% of United States electricity demand with wind power would require impossible weather conditions and a wind farm covering an area larger than Texas and Louisiana combined.

     Because of their extremely low power to weight ratio, windmills require the use of huge amounts of steel in their construction.  Where are we going to get the massive amounts of steel needed to construct legions of windmills that will cover our countryside like an army of alien invaders?  Probably places like China and South Korea.  Wind power is being sold to the public as a carbon neutral product, but making steel is not a carbon neutral process.  Steel is often made from power generated by burning coal and other fossil fuels.  If we make steel using costly wind or solar power, the price of steel will skyrocket, thus further increasing the cost of constructing the windmills themselves.  That is why we need a compact energy source with a very high power to weight ratio.  Because of the enormous amount of resources required for their construction, and their intermittent and unreliable performance, windmills will not reduce CO2 emissions.

     British scientist James Lovelock, father of the living-earth Gaia theory, has stated that nuclear power is the only way to have a large human population on planet earth without causing global warming.  Please read James Lovelock's essay, Nuclear power is the only green solution.  Nuclear power is the only technology that can produce an extremely high volume of energy using just a tiny amount of land and at reasonable cost, all without emitting significant amounts of greenhouse gases.  It is a scientifically provable fact that the one and only energy source large enough and concentrated enough to practically replace earth's massive fossil energy reservoir is nuclear power.  The mass of an atom is in its nucleus, not in its electrons, and as E=MC² the nucleus is where the really BIG energy is stored.

     The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) solves all of the major problems associated with nuclear power.  LFTRs transform thorium into fissionable uranium-233, which then produces heat through controlled nuclear fission.  LFTRs only requires input of uranium or plutonium to kick-start the initial nuclear reaction, and as the fissionable material can come from either spent fuel rods or old nuclear warheads, LFTRs will inevitably be used as janitors to clean up old nuclear waste.  Once started, the controlled nuclear reactions are self-perpetuating as long as the reactor is fed thorium.  LFTRs are highly fuel efficient and burn up 100% of the thorium fed them.  Light water reactors typically burn only about 3% of their loaded fuel, or about .7% of the fundamental raw uranium which must be enriched to become fissionable.  As LFTR fuel is a molten liquid salt, it can be cleansed of impurities and refortified with thorium through elaborate plumbing even while the reactor maintains full power operation.  The cost savings of using a liquid fuel is like the difference between making soup vs. baking a wedding cake.  Soup is cheap, and you can change ingredients very easily.  The reactor works like a Crock-Pot; you keep the fuel cooking in the pot until it is over 99% burned, so LFTRs produce less than 1% of the long-lived radioactive waste of light water reactors, making Yucca Mountain waste storage unnecessary.

     LFTRs produce electric power via a waterless gas turbine system that can use helium, carbon dioxide, or nitrogen gas.  The reactors are small and air cooled, so they can be installed anywhere, even in a desert.  Robert Hargraves, an LFTR advocate, states that "Liquid fluoride thorium reactors operate at high temperature for 50% thermal/electrical conversion efficiency, thus they need only half of the cooling required by today's coal or nuclear plant cooling towers."  LFTRs will be manufactured on an assembly line, dramatically lowering costs and enabling electricity generation at a projected rate of about 3 cents per kilowatt hour, which is cheaper than burning coal for power.  It has been estimated that a physically small 100 megawatt LFTR could be built for less than 200 million dollars, which is a bargain.  Multiple reactors can be installed at one location and connected to a single control room.  With convenient modular design, LFTRs can be transported in pieces by truck or barge for easy assembly on site.  This allows for swift construction with reliable results, avoiding delays and cost overruns.  Rapid assembly line construction also allows for easy updating of the design, which will improve over time like the dramatic evolution of automobiles, airplanes, and computer chips.

     A LFTR can never meltdown because its fuel is already in a molten state by design.  Any terrorists who obtained forceful entry into the reactor complex could not realistically remove any of the hot molten fissionable fuel.  Coolant in LFTRs is not pressurized as in light water reactors, and the fuel arrives at the plant pre-burned with fluorine, a powerful oxidizer.  This makes a reactor fire or a coolant explosion impossible.  LFTRs do not require large, cavernous pressure vessels designed to contain an internal explosion of superheated steam, so LFTR enclosures are tightly fitting and compact, which makes them less expensive.  The reactors will be installed underground with a thick reinforced concrete cap, making an attack by a kamikaze airplane pilot ineffective.  Overheating of a LFTR expands the molten salt fuel past its criticality point, making the design intrinsically safe due to the unchangeable laws of physics.  Even a total loss of operational reactor control would not cause disaster.  In addition to the fuel's natural safety, any excess heat in the reactor core would automatically melt built-in freeze-plugs, causing the liquid fuel to drain via gravity into underground storage compartments where the fuel would then cool into a harmless, noncritical mass.

     Thorium is more abundant in the earth's crust than tin, and only slightly less abundant than lead.  The United States alone has hundreds, if not thousands of years worth of low cost thorium fuel available from domestic sources, and total world thorium supplies are enormous, with estimates ranging from a 10,000 year supply, to a supply lasting millions of years.  Until now thorium has been a waste product that has been thrown away by burying it in deserts and in old mine shafts.  If we really wanted to find thorium with the same interest we have in finding oil, we could probably obtain more thorium than the human race will ever need to use.  NASA rocket scientist Kirk Sorensen stated that "The amount of thorium it would take to power my whole life is the size of a marble that would fit in my hand.  The amount of coal that would power my life would bury my yard to 30 or 40 feet."

     France's Reactor Physics Group is currently leading in LFTR research.  If the United States committed a relatively modest amount of money to develop LFTRs in cooperation with France, a fully operational TOTAL ENERGY SOLUTION might be possible within as little as 5 years, because most of the basic research has already been accomplished and is well proven.  LFTR research at the United States Oak Ridge National Laboratory was ended in 1976 because LFTRs cannot practically produce usable nuclear weapons materials.  [See Robert Hargraves fascinating Aim High LFTR proposal with slide presentation on 3.2MB PDF.  See chemical engineer K.L. Johnson's brilliant slide show, Life-Sustaining Energy from Thorium and The Sustainable Chemistry and Energy of Thorium.  Also see Energy From Thorium and the International Thorium Energy Organization]

     We can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by creating an infrastructure based on thorium power, improved electric car battery technology, and the use of new technology called Green Freedom.  The Green Freedom process can create superior quality, sulfur free gasoline and jet fuel made from atmospheric carbon dioxide and hydrogen extracted from water.  [See the Green Freedom process 1.8MB PDF]  This energy scheme is cheaper than using pure hydrogen gas as fuel because it is completely compatible with current vehicles and our existing energy distribution infrastructure.  Green Freedom can also be used to make much needed synthetic fertilizers.  The process demands very low cost nuclear energy to work economically, and as the LFTR design can produce energy at a fraction of the cost of traditional light water nuclear reactors, we can have an endless supply of liquid fuels produced on American soil by American labor, and without all the political and military ramifications of importing oil from other countries.  If you want the world to progress to the kind of wealthy, poverty free civilization portrayed in optimistic science fiction movies, realize that nuclear power is the only way to get there.

Other Energy Sources

     Traditional hydroelectric power plants are useful for large scale energy production because they turn the concentrated kinetic energy of moving water into huge amounts of reliable, continuous electricity.  The amazing Hoover Dam, which spans the Colorado River, has an average annual net electricity generation of 4.2 billion kilowatt hours, which is produced at a cost of just .0186 cents per kilowatt hour.  Opportunities to build new hydroelectric projects, such as the Auburn Dam in California, should not be overlooked.

     The United States has significant geothermal energy reserves which can be efficiently tapped using newly designed modular, lower temperature geothermal equipment.  Like nuclear power plants, geothermal power is reliable, takes up very little space, and produces continuous power day and night, independent of weather conditions.  A recent MIT study states that geothermal wells could provide up to 10% of our nation's energy needs by the year 2050.  Geothermal power is not classified as a renewable energy source, because hot geothermal wells eventually run cold.

     To lower energy costs in the short term, the United States should tap its large oil and natural gas deposits in the Alaska ANWR oil reserve.  We should open up ANWR's entire 19.6 million acres to oil and gas exploration, because drilling on dry land is extremely safe and has none of the major ecological risks associated with drilling for oil at the bottom of oceans.  If we wish to limit ocean drilling for safety concerns, then we must allow dry land oil extraction to keep our economy alive until we can replace oil altogether with synthetic fuels made with the help of nuclear power.  The Bakken Oil Formation holds billions of barrels of recoverable oil which we can use without driving up the cost of food.  Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming contain far more oil than the entire Middle East in the form of oil shale deposits, which are suitable for extraction using newly developed in-ground (in-situ) oil recovery techniques.  Shell Oil physicist Harold Vinegar believes that by the year 2015 oil can be produced from shale for about $30 per barrel.

     The Energy Information Administration (EIA), which provides official energy statistics from the United States Government, has projected the 2016 Levelized Cost of New Generation Resources from the Annual Energy Outlook 2010.  This is the current best estimate of the cost of electricity from United States power plants of different varieties that will come into service in the year 2016.  These average levelized costs, expressed in 2008 valued dollars, includes all costs of construction, financing, fuel, and all other operating and decommissioning costs.  Federal and state government subsidies are not included in these figures.  Additional costs of back-up and/or storage systems for unreliable energy sources are not included.  The significant costs of long transmission lines for projects that must be built far away from electricity consumers are also not included in these projections.  These are national average costs, which means there is variation in cost from state to state and project to project, depending on local circumstances.  The EIA also listed the expected Capacity Factor (CF) for each power plant type.  A power plant with a CF of 85% generates energy at its rated capacity an average of 85% of the time during a given year.  The ideal power plant would have a CF of 100%, meaning it could output energy at full power 100% of the time.  As capacity factor drops, electricity grid efficiency drops, and real-world costs increase.  In the comparison below I have inflated the projected cost of electricity produced by LFTRs from the projected 3 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) to 6 cents per kWh in order to allow for unexpected cost overruns.      

Natural Gas in Conventional Combined Cycle @ 8.31 cents per kWh (87% CF) - Not carbon free, high CF, medium ecological footprint, cost effective and cleanest fossil fuel available.

Natural Gas in Advanced Combined Cycle with Carbon Capture and Storage @ 11.33 cents per kWh (87% CF) - Not carbon free, high CF, medium ecological footprint, cost effective and cleanest fossil fuel available.
 
Conventional Coal @ 10.04 cents per kWh (85% CF)

Advanced Coal with CCS @ 12.93 cents per kWh (85% CF) - Conventional coal fired plants are not carbon free, high CF, large ecological footprint, and cause approximately 24,000 U.S. deaths per year due to air pollution, which also damages buildings.  Judged in total, traditional coal fired power plants are not cost effective due to the environmental damage and deaths they create.  Will  Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) techniques make coal an acceptable choice?

3rd Generation Light Water Reactor Nuclear Power @ 11.9 cents per kWh (90% CF) - Carbon free, very high CF, small ecological footprint, and cost effective.  *Note - These figures are for new construction projects coming on-line in 2016.  Our older legacy light water reactors currently produce electricity at a cost of about 2 cents per kWh.

Geothermal @ 11.57 cents per kWh (90% CF) - Carbon free, very high CF, small ecological footprint and cost effective.

Wind @ 14.93 cents per kWh not including the cost of needed energy storage and/or back-up systems (34.4% CF)

Wind - Offshore @ 19.11 cents per kWh not including the cost of needed energy storage and/or back-up systems (39.3% CF) - Carbon free, very low CF, extremely large ecological footprint, not cost effective due high construction cost, unreliability, and very low CF.  Most wind turbines shut down when wind speeds drop below 3 to 4 meters per second or rise above 25 meters per second, greatly reducing their total average energy output and making their contribution to our nation's energy grid unpredictable.

Solar Thermal @ 25.66 cents per kWh not including the cost of needed energy storage and/or back-up systems (31.2% CF) - Carbon free, extremely low CF, extremely large ecological footprint, not cost effective due to high construction cost and a CF even lower than wind power.

Solar Photovoltaic @ 39.61 cents per kWh not including the cost of needed energy storage and/or back-up systems (21.7% CF) - Carbon free, extremely low CF, extremely large ecological footprint, very high construction cost, cannot be upgraded after manufacture, and short lifespan.  Solar photovoltaic panels are absolutely not cost effective for large scale power production.

     The appeal of solar, wind, wave energy, and biofuels is largely about poetry and symbolism, sending a love letter to mother nature saying that we care.  Poetry is fine, but we need huge amounts of energy to support the 6.75 billion human inhabitants of this planet, and billions will starve to death if governments try to use these poetically correct energy sources as a replacement for fossil fuels.  It takes so much energy to plant, fertilize, harvest, process, and transport crops that any increases in energy prices always results in increased food prices. 

     In order to produce large amounts of energy we have to destroy something.  We can destroy our food supply by making biofuels, or we can destroy our forests by producing biomass to burn in power plants.  We can destroy thousands of square miles of America by covering our land with solar panels and windmills.  More responsibly, we can destroy the most worthless substance on earth, thorium, to make our energy.  We have enough thorium to supply us with cheap energy for a minimum of 10,000 years, and probably millions of years if we extract thorium from granite and other less concentrated sources.  Thorium power cannot be classified as "renewable," but it is the best hope we have for our continued survival.

Christopher Calder      email = calderhouse at yahoo.com