editorial

"They tell us, sir, that we are weak . . . But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year?"

Patrick Henry asked that, in his renowned "liberty or death" speech in 1775.

There's a curious echo of this question in the current national dither over the energy crisis.

The mood in Washington is very reminiscent of the combination of gloom and panic that was rampant some sixteen years ago, when the Russians launched Sputnik and established an early lead in the so-called Space Race. There was the same dithering, the same pointing of shaking fingers, the same feelings of fright and frustration, the same scary realization that we were in deep trouble in an area that we had always taken for granted.

It's fashionable to believe—now that the Space Race was an ephemeral creation of politicians and industrial hacks; that the so-called Missile Gap was a public relations maneuver to win votes and hugely profitable contracts for the aerospace companies. Yet the Race was very real. There was a time when the Soviet Union had nuclear-armed missiles standing ready for flight and we had none. That is part of the reason why we never intervened in the Hungarian rebellion of 1956. There was a time when the Russians were far ahead of us in space feats, and used these triumphs to impress the nations of the underdeveloped world. This was the time when the Russians penetrated the Middle East with technical and military assistance programs. The Arabs were rightly impressed by the Sputniks, Luniks, and Vostoks.

There have been loud cries of despair over the current energy crisis, and equally loud grumblings to the effect that the whole thing is an artificially created problem, a manufactured scare produced by the politicians and the big oil companies, who are manipulating us into allowing the oil companies to raise their prices, escape environmental protection rules, and drill for oil everywhere and anywhere they choose to.

What are the facts?

Are we truly in a deep crisis, where we will have to drastically change our energy consumption patterns? Or are we being manipulated by a sinister combination of governmental and industrial Svengalis?

Just as in the wildest days of the early Space Race, facts are hard to come by. There's a flood of information, claims and counterclaims, but real, verifiable facts seem extremely rare. Let's get back to the very basic areas, and see what we can learn about the situation.

Basically, our energy systems consist of the following components: fuel resources, such as deposits of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas), fissionables, or other potential fuels; processing facilities, in which the fuels are prepared for use; distribution systems for getting the fuels from their original locations to the processing facilities and then to the users; electric power plants, where some of the fuel is converted into electricity; distribution systems for the electricity; and finally the myriad end uses of the energy—which range from home heating to transportation to electric toothbrushes.

There is no shortage of fuel resources. By every estimate from any source whatever, the conclusion is that there is enough oil to keep feeding world consumption at its present level for at least another century. But most of the known oil deposits are in Arab lands, and the Arabs are using this resource as a weapon in their struggle against Israel.

To a world that has blithely assumed that Arab oil would not only be available indefinitely, but would be available cheaply, the Arab oil embargo has been a devastating shock. The United States, which now consumes between one-quarter and one-third of the entire world's output of energy, and Western Europe, which is the next hungriest energy consumer, have been especially hard hit.

Although the latest phase of the fratricidal Arab-Israeli war triggered the oil embargo, it seems clear that the Arabs would have been raising the prices of their oil sooner or later. Since the end of World War Two, America and Western Europe have been buying oil from the Arabs at prices that were almost literally dirt cheap. It was inevitable that the Arabs would someday realize how dependent we are on their only export item, and start hiking the prices.

What about other sources of fossil fuel? The US is actually fantastically rich in such resources. True, most of our oil and natural gas wells are being rapidly depleted. Even the newly-developed fields in Alaska's North Slope region aren't big enough to satisfy more than a small percentage of our current consumption. But we have vast coal deposits, both in the eastern Appalachian regions and in western states such as Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota. In addition, we have oil shale deposits and offshore oil fields that have not been utilized yet.

In all, conservative estimates show that we have within our own territory fossil fuel deposits that are easily ten times more abundant than all the oil in the Middle East. Enough fossil fuel to keep us going for five hundred years, at least.

But—it's now impossible to use these resources without staggering environmental damage. Stripping the water-scarce western states of their coal deposits could scar those areas permanently. The same would happen if we began digging up the oil shale. And no one really wants offshore oil rigs messing up the beaches where they live or play.

Moreover, much of this fuel—especially the western coal—is high in sulfur. Burning it in power plants, for example, would create serious air pollution problems.

Somewhat the same situation applies to our stores of nuclear fuels, uranium and thorium. We have enough fissionables in our own ground to last not merely for centuries or even a millennium or two; there's enough for a million years, according to most estimates. Even assuming that we don't use breeder reactors to convert low-grade fissionables into high-grade, useful fuel, there's enough uranium easily available for a century or more, at the most conservative estimate.

But again, environmental questions come up. Are nuclear power plants really safe? Can they be operated without creating unacceptable levels of thermal pollution of our water resources?

We have the fuel resources. Whether or not we can use them depends on several factors. It's clear that the big oil companies are using the energy crisis to try to evade the constrictions placed on them a few years ago by an environment-conscious public. The oil companies are saying, in essence, "Let us dig for oil wherever we want to, and stop hampering us with all these frilly considerations of air pollution and environmental degradation, and we'll have everything back to normal pretty soon."

Even if we let them have their way, the one thing that won't be back to normal for a long time (if ever) is the price we must pay for energy.

One of the major reasons for that—and a prime factor in the crisis—is that the United States simply does not have enough oil refining facilities to supply the nation with adequate refined petroleum products.

For decades, the oil companies have consistently "underestimated" the nation's growing demands for oil and its byproducts, and have built refineries at a rate less than the actual growth of demand. This has resulted in our need to import refined oil—we actually ship crude oil overseas and then re-import it (our own oil!) after it's been refined.

So the oil companies have not spent as much of their capital on refineries as the situation demanded. The result is that petroleum products are scarcer, in greater demand than ever. So the oil companies are "forced" to raise their prices! Their profits, crisis or not, have been rising steadily.

What about new sources of energy? New fuels? There are plenty of good ideas available, from hydrogen as a replacement for the fossil fuels, through geothermal power, solar power, power from the sea, and—ultimately—fusion power. No doubt all of these will come into use, one way or another. We will have hydrogen-fueled cars and planes someday, and solar-heated houses and office buildings. Much of California could be powered by geothermal energy, and many seacoast areas could make use of the ocean's temperature differentials to create electrical energy.

Ultimately we will have thermonuclear fusion, and when that happens our energy crisis will be solved forever.

But all of these bright promises will take a minimum of five to ten years before they become realities.

Let me tell you briefly about one such bright promise. It's a good example of how this entire energy business got into a crisis situation.

In 1959 I went to work for the Avco Everett Research Laboratory, mainly to help publicize their research in a new technique of generating electrical power, called magnetohydrodynamics (MHD).

At that time, a combination of several electric utility companies and Avco Corporation had decided that the nation's growing demand for electrical energy meant that new and more efficient power generation technology was vitally needed.

It was known then—in 1959!— that the United States' demand for electricity was growing at a rate that doubled the demand every ten years. Forecasters were showing that the standard technology would not be able to keep up with the demand. The goal of the MHD program was to have working MHD power generators on the line in the 1970's.

Without going into details on how an MHD generator works (I wrote an article on the subject that appeared in the May 1965 Analog), the main point is that an MHD power plant would be at least fifty percent more efficient than a standard power plant. The MHD process would use fossil fuel, and produce fifty percent more electrical power per kilogram of coal, oil or gas than the fossil-fueled (or nuclear) power plants we are still using today.

The power companies loudly proclaimed that this was one research program that good ol' private enterprise was going to handle by itself. Uncle Sam wasn't going to get his sticky fingers on this baby, as he did in the nuclear business.

By the middle 1960's, the MHD process had been tested well enough so that Avco was ready to build a pilot power plant. Cost, about thirty million dollars. Suddenly Uncle Sam was the power companies' favorite relative. They declined to risk that much of their own money, and cried to get the Federal Government to make the investment.

The Federal Government was preoccupied with Vietnam and other problems, and didn't care about MHD or energy problems. The pilot plant got built, all right. And it's operating right now. In Moscow.

It wasn't until 1970 that Avco was able to put together a combination of Federal and industrial support to get moving again on MHD. During those five wasted years, a good deal of the oomph went out of the MHD research effort. Technical teams don't moth ball easily. People left the program and got interested in other areas. The MHD effort is now at just about the place it would have been in, say, 1965—thanks to the foresight of the electric utilities' managements and the US Department of the Interior's experts.

That kind of thinking—or actually, lack of thinking—is the real reason for the energy crisis. There is no shortage of resources. There is no lack of technological skill. There has been a lack of interest both in industry and government in doing anything to head off the problem. Of course, now that the dam has burst, the barn's burned down, and the wolf's inside the door, everyone is following the classic response pattern of panic:

"When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." What needs to be done seems both clear and relatively straightforward. We must:

1. Develop new sources of energy that don't require fossil fuels. From steam power to thermonuclear fusion, we should be pushing on all practical ideas.

2. Utilize nuclear energy much more fully. Most of the hold-up in fission power has been due to the public's concern about radiation hazards and thermal pollution of water. Both these problems are solvable by proper application of known technology, and an absolutely honest policy of public relations. The people will support fission power plants once they are convinced that they are safe and won't destroy the local water resources.

3. Our own deposits of fossil fuels should be utilized, with as little harm to the environment as possible. Strip mining can devastate a landscape, true enough. But it may be possible either to get the coal in other ways or to reclaim the landscape after the mining operations have moved on. Moreover, it's technologically possible to convert high-sulfur coal into a cleaner fuel, such as natural gas. These environmental protection steps will be expensive, but they could be funded jointly out of the oil companies' excessive profits and public taxes.

4. Most importantly, we must obtain the leadership and sense of direction that is so conspicuously lacking at the moment. The Space Race was won the moment that John F. Kennedy decided to focus our efforts on putting a man on the Moon. Regardless of why he came to that conclusion, once he established the goal, we quickly outstripped the Russians and turned a once-scary situation into a no-contest.

It's grimly ironic that the scientists and engineers, who have been abused both by the radical left and the conservative right, who have had their funding slashed and their laboratories closed, who have been pilloried for being tools of the Pentagon and impractical eggheads—the scientists and engineers are the ones who will actually pull us out of the energy crisis.

It may take ten years, although the results of a really strong, vital program will begin to be felt much sooner than that. The White House is currently planning to spend ten billion dollars over the next five years on energy research and development. Dollar numbers in the Nixon Administration don't always mean a lot, because many games are played with such figures. But it seems clear that what's needed is more like a hundred billion dollars over the next ten years.

That would be an annual rate of funding about twice the size of the space program in its heyday. Considering the effects of inflation and the seriousness of the problem, that figure isn't extravagant.

We have the resources, the talent, the technology to solve the energy crisis. The question is, do we have the guts, the heart, the leadership, the will to get the job done?

Returning to Patrick Henry, he answered his own question in the same speech: "Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of the means which the God of nature has placed in our power. . . . The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave."

Can you imagine what fiery Patrick would be doing in Washington today?

THE EDITOR