I wonder how long people are going to make political games out of
cheap power for the United States. We have oil a-plenty, in the Gulf
of Mexico, off the California coast, in the ANWR, and in the oil sands
of Colorado and Utah. Of course, we can’t go after it because some
idiot environazi will chain himself to a gas pump or something, or
a Hollywood star will protest on the Oprah show, or female protestors
will organize a nude march somewhere (don’t get excited, guys, some
of those women could make a Christian believe in evolution).
Second
choice is natural gas, but that particular commodity has a bad habit
of showing up in near the same places as crude oil does, with the
aforementioned activities to be expected. Shame, because we have a
lot of natural gas, both the kind found deep in the earth and the
kind generated by the blowhards in Washington. Or would that be hot
air? Guess they blow it out both ends, so natural gas would be one
by-product of those interminable self-congratulatory dinners they
attend.
Coal used to be used a lot. Dad worked at a power plant that
generated electricity from burning coal. Problem is, if we burn
coal for power, we pollute the atmosphere. So what we do is mine the
coal, load it on ships, and ship it to other countries. They can burn
it there, for power, to make steel, and sundry other things. Guess
they don’t have any ugly female environazis to parade around naked
in protest. Or maybe they have a different atmosphere over there. I kinda favor nuclear power, myself. In fact, there’s one about
seventy miles down the road from where I’m typing this. Don’t hear
much about it, it just sits there generating megawatts of electricity
with no problems. But a lot of people do have a problem with nuclear
power. Seems it generates waste, in the form of spent fuel rods and
suchlike other nuclear detritus. And nobody wants to put up with the
stuff. The way they have to handle it is to put it in concrete
and bury it. Course, it’s like a prison, or a home for the retarded,
everyone says “Not in MY backyard!”, so finding a place to put the
stuff is a real problem. I have to be honest, I don’t really want
it buried in my backyard, either. My puppy likes to dig, and I don’t
want him to end up glowing in the dark.
I got to thinking about that,
and it occurred to me that every place in the world has that problem.
Maybe the United States could provide a solution. I don’t know how
your mind works when you think of the problem of nuclear disposal,
but for me a solution presented itself almost immediately. Of course,
I’m a generalist, and I try to know a little about a lot. But
the science exists behind what I think would work. It’s just
a question of furnaces, and trains, and the Rocky Mountains. I won’t
go into the details, because this is a column, not a book on the sciences
involved.
The Japanese have bullet trains that run on electricity.
They float above the rails they travel by, on a “cushion” of magnetism.
Thinking about them led me to thinking about magnetic cannons, which
use magnetism to propel an object a great distance at high speed.
Then there’s the Rocky Mountains. Pretty neat gun platform. Imagine
a metal cylinder, loaded with nuclear waste materials by remote control.
We have robot designs now that can be adapted to the purpose. This can be done in a facility totally devoid of human workers, using
current remote control and camera technology to accomplish the task.
The loaded cylinder would then be moved to the launch point, the point
of entry into a cylinder to the stars or, more specifically, to a
certain star that’s rather close to this ole planet. The cylinder
is placed in the tube, and launched outside the atmosphere, using
the principle of a magnetic cannon. It can either be launched to intersect
the sun, or just placed in orbit, to be picked up later be a remote-controlled
(from Earth) space vehicle and gently nudged out of orbit on a path
to the sun. It would take a lot of power to launch these tubes on
a regular basis, but power use could be controlled by using fairly
small packages, and by using a nuclear reactor to provide the necessary
electrical power. The sun could handle an unlimited number of packages
of this sort, and act as a furnace to destroy the waste. We have the
technology, the skill, the manpower, the brainpower, and the expertise
to get the job done. First, by making progressively larger cannon,
and perfecting the amount of power required per pound to provide the
nuclear launch into orbit. Second, by selling the idea to other nuclear
nations, by working out contracts to dispose of their nuclear waste,
too. This can actually become a source of income for the United States.
In a perfect world, private enterprise would be the driving force
behind an idea such as this, and I suppose private enterprise could
do if they could have a promise from the government to stay out of
the way. The usual regulatory commissions would, of course,
want to stick their noses into such a project, to ensure that no spotted
owls, redwoods, wetlands etc. were damaged in the process. Then
too, the AFL-CIO would probably protest about the facility being automated
(due to high radiation) but we could cut a deal with them, and agree
to use surplus lawyers from the ACLU to staff the place, replacing
them as they disintegrate. We might run out of ACLU lawyers after
a while, but there’s always other sources of idiocy. The point
is, there’s been a way to deal with the problem of nuclear waste disposal
for some time. It will work, if we get people to seriously consider
it, and start planning and building. When something outlives its usefulness,
throw it away. Only I propose using available technology to throw
that something a little farther away.
Copyright Feb 19, 2006
by Dave Hoffman.
Unrestricted use granted to all who identify
author.
Beneficium accipere libertatem est vendere.
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