Environmental Extremism - Spencer Abraham

Yesterday, The Detroit News ran an article about Spencer Abraham stepping down as head of the Energy Department. He is quoted in the article as saying:

"But if we continue to see a lack of growth in the nuclear power sector, if we continue to see regulations make it more difficult to produce natural gas or oil domestically, then, that will have the opposite effect on prices," he says. "That's the issue people are going to have to come to grips with."

"If you are going to address the global climate issues, as well as the growth in energy and electricity demand, you have to make nuclear energy part of the equation," Abraham adds. "Those countries that are Kyoto signatories are going to have a difficult time meeting their Kyoto targets (of pollution reductions) if they don't have nuclear at least as part of the mix."

On October 23, I wrote:

It is not about resources... it is about fear. There are plenty of energy sources. It is all about using our resources in the most constructive way possible. We have a world full of coal, but we fear it because we remember the soot scattered over the white snow 50 years ago and refuse to accept that it can be burned cleanly today. We have a world full of nuclear materials and safe designs for power plants, but we fear it because we remember the shoddy way it was handled in Chernobyl. We have an abundance of oil in North America, but we are slow to develop it because importing it is politically easier (but may not be cheaper very soon).

Nevertheless, I continue to have the concern that the wrong-headed thinking is being used in planning for alternative fuels to oil and coal:

Abraham says the international consensus among countries he's worked with, including Japan, the European Union and China, is to invest substantially in hydrogen research.

"We foresee an evolution to a hydrogen economy where hydrogen is a much more frequently used fuel for motor vehicles, but also to power stationary electricity production," he says, adding, "it's still down the road."

In a climate of worries about gas-guzzling vehicles, he says one of the attractions of hydrogen is that it allows people to continue to choose whatever operating system they want.

"You can put it in the kinds of vehicles people want," Abraham says. "The efficiency will exist whether it's in a compact or an SUV. It has the potential to really maintain people's market choices while still dramatically reducing consumption of petroleum products. It has the other great benefit of having minimal emission issues, because only really water vapor emerges when you use these kinds of fuel-cell vehicles."

I have a major concern when the head of the Department of Energy says that hydrogen can be used to power stationary electric production... since the opposite is what happens... stationary electric power is used to produce hydrogen. From my November 4 post:

False science, such as the "hydrogen energy" efforts divert us from real, responsible approaches to protecting the environment while providing for the needs and growth of society [hint: hydrogen is a "storage medium" for energy... but to create hydrogen gas, large amounts of energy in the form of electricity... from oil, coal, nuclear material... must be expended].

I agree that using hydrogen fuel, produced from electricity, produced from either nuclear or geothermal energy, is a desirable alternative to continued expansion of oil or coal power generation. It is important to get the stories straight so that people don't think that we can avoid the use of nuclear power because they believe that we can have a hydrogen energy economy rather than a hydrogen fuel economy... unless he is talking about hydrogen fusion technology for generating power... and that is a very long way off, indeed.