Readers who responded in the November 2004 issue of Physics Today to the earlier articles on energy and population seem to fall into two main categories: those who believe the population problem is already solved through declining birth rates and those who believe the energy problem is already solved because we have nuclear power and continuing energy efficiency improvements. Both views are falsely optimistic and minimize the tremendous technology development problem we face: to provide sufficient energy for a prosperous world in the 21st century and beyond.
Even with the most dramatic conceivable drop in birth rate, the only way population will decrease sufficiently in coming decades is with a correspondingly dramatic increase in death rate. I am surprised so many physicists seem willing to accept that option.
Nuclear energy has four basic obstacles that may prevent it from ever being scaled up by the factor of 20 to 50 needed to address world energy needs: cost, incompetence, corruption, and waste. No breeder reactor, a technology necessary for nuclear fission to be a long-term solution, has ever been successful in the marketplace. Because each plant has such enormous energy content, staff incompetence, even at reactors billed as inherently safe, can lead to much more serious disasters than for other energy sources. A world filled with breeder reactors would necessarily include large-scale traffic in plutonium; just one criminal in the supply chain could trigger a nuclear catastrophe. And the long-lived accumulative character of nuclear waste justifiably frightens many educated members of the public. Billions of dollars have been spent on nuclear energy research, with little progress on resolving any of these issues at the scale that would be needed.
Energy efficiency improvements can only slightly mitigate the continued growth in world energy demand as developing countries advance. The energy problem we face is immense: In coming decades, trillions of dollars of energy infrastructure will need to be replaced with alternatives of some sort. All the renewable energy options face cost issues, both in production and in transmission and storage, that put them beyond large-scale deployment, at least until significant research investment brings those costs lower. The problem is on the scale of the cold war, but policymakers and the general public are not treating it as such. It is past time that the US Secretary of Energy should be given the same respect, and a comparable budget, as the Secretary of Defense, and be charged with resolving this critical problem for the nation.
Chemistry Nobel laureate Richard Smalley has been speaking on the energy problem around the country; I heard him recently at Brookhaven National Laboratory. His specific suggestion is a “nickel and dime” solution: a gasoline tax of $0.05/gallon and perhaps similar carbon taxes on other fossil fuels, to raise about $10 billion per year for alternative energy research. That’s the scale we need, not the miserly $80 million solar energy gets in the current US budget. And physicists and engineers must energetically tackle the critical problems, just as they did 60 years ago for the Manhattan Project. Every year of delay in developing these alternatives further threatens the future well-being of humanity.
