Nuclear Fission: Bridge to Fusion Power The next President of the United States will be confronted with the greatest energy crisis yet seen. This time, it will not be the result of a shutoff in oil supplies, nor supposed threats to the supply of this so-called strategic commodity which helped motivate last year's genocide against Iraq. This time, it will be the result of the insanity of the national energy policy which we have tolerated since the early 1970s. The crisis is scheduled to erupt as a breakdown of what used to be the world's most productive and cheapest electricity generating system. For that we have only ourselves to blame. The energy crisis could erupt as early as the first half of the next President's term in office. Lyndon LaRouche is the only candidate with the qualifications to deal with it. If voters had not ignored the energy policy platform he put before the country in 1980, and again in 1984, we would not now be facing the crisis which is looming ahead. Even as late as 1988, LaRouche's policy, if it had been adopted, could have helped avert what is now becoming all but inevitable. - Three Aspects of the Crisis - There are three aspects of the new energy crisis: {1. National Science Policy.} The question here is whether the nation is prepared to rebuild its dismantled scientific and engineering capacity to the end of realizing the potentials of controlled thermonuclear fusion power. Using sea water as its resource for the fusion of hydrogen and deuterium, fusion power will bring the energy source of the stars down to Earth, for a cheap, virtually inexhaustible energy source. {2. The Role of Nuclear Fission}. Can Americans muster sufficient rationality to accept the scientific fact that nuclear energy is our only means to reverse the depression collapse at home and end the genocide against the Third World? Without a commitment to rebuilding the nuclear industry as rapidly as possible, there will be no future, either for the United States, or for the rest of the world. What is needed is the establishment of an industry for the mass production of modular nuclear plants, such as the Modular High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor (MHTGR) proposed by General Atomics (diagram). Development of our nuclear fission capabilities will provide the bridge to the energy source of the 21st century: nuclear fusion. {3. Time to Dump Environmentalism}. Will Americans wake up and realize that the ``environmentalism'' and ``magic of the marketplace'' obsessions of the last years are shameless frauds? These are the cover stories for the deliberate deindustrialization of America. In the case of our energy industry, environmentalism has brought us to the point at which America's lights are about to go out. - Blackout - The energy crisis has been made inevitable by the refusal to invest in new generating capacity to meet increasing demand for electricity. It will be exacerbated as the provisions of the Clean Air Act, especially as they apply to coal-burning utilities, go into effect. Since the mid-1980s, government and utilities have insisted that demand for electricity has slowed to the point that capacity planned to come on line by the end of the decade will suffice. It won't. Their projected increase in demand, at less than 2% per annum, has been consistently wrong. Growth reported by the Energy Information Administration has consistently been nearly twice what utilities and government have forecast. The capacity to meet the added demand does not, and will not, exist. By the end of the 1980s, the National Electric Reliability Council (NERC) had estimated that, with approximately 2% annual growth in demand for electricity, 200-300 gigawatts of generating capacity (a gigawatt is approximately enough energy to supply a city of 1 million people) would have to be added to the inventory of generating equipment. By the early 1990s, about 86 gigawatts could be accounted for as planned, of which 28.7 gigawatts were under construction. These estimates were intended to assure that there would be no shortages by the end of the decade. With a 10-year lead time to complete construction of even a coal-fired plant, anything not yet under construction will not be part of the generating grid 10 years from now, unless policies are changed. A shortfall in energy supplies will lead to voltage reductions and power interruptions--Third World style. Brownouts and blackouts will happen during extremes of weather--winter cold and summer heat--which define the peak demand for electricity. Increasingly, they will become an ever-present fact of life. The 1991 amendments to the 1972 Clean Air Act, which will knock out more than 12 gigawatts of capacity, will make things worse. The Bush administration proposed in its 1991 National Energy Plan legislation that the reduction of the growth of energy consumption would provide a solution to the supply crisis. William Reilly, head of the Environmental Protection Adminstration, espoused his ``green lights campaign,'' to have corporate consumers of electricity commit to ``energy efficient'' forms of lighting to help reduce demand. The Bush crowd has also proposed to ``deregulate'' the electric utilities, opening up electricity generation to manufacturers of generating equipment, windmill owners, dung-burners and who knows what else, all in the name of ``increasing competitiveness.'' These are proposals which will kill people--the old and the sick, the poor and the defenseless--as such policies have been killing, inside and outside the United States, for more than a generation. But that is what they are designed to do. - Shutting Down the Nuclear Industry - Since the February 1978 sabotage of Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the pretext which permitted the green Jimmy Carter to begin the shutdown of the nation's nuclear industry, enough nuclear-based electric generating capacity been cancelled to have averted the crisis now before us. This includes nearly 100 power plants ordered before 1978. (No new nuclear plant has been ordered since 1978.) But it also includes the cancellation of 80 coal-fired plants, destined for operation as ``base-load'' generating units, that is, units which would have been producing power 24 hours a day. This has been done in the name of protecting the environment. It has been enforced by the financial dictatorship imposed on utilities, since former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's high interest rate policy of 1979 plunged U.S. manufacturing industries, especially capital-goods producing industries, into a depression from which they have never recovered. The eruption of a crisis in the nation's power supply has been temporarily delayed by the depression. Back in the 1960s, manufacturing industries used to account for about half of the nation's electricity consumption. In the intervening period, manufacturing's share of electricity consumption has fallen to around 30% of the total. If we still produced the shoes and the socks and the shirts and pants, as well as the steel and machinery we need to survive, energy shortages would have become apparent many years ago. Until the Carter administration, the growth of U.S. electrification, doubling every ten years, was unique in the world. The 1970s broke the pattern, as growth fell from over 7% per year in the 1960s to around 3% per year, and since then has collapsed by half again. The growth of electrification was crucial to the production of what used to be America's high standard of living. Since the East Coast blackouts of 1965, when the National Electric Reliability Council (NERC) was formed, America's regulated electric utilities were mandated to ensure, as first priority, reliability of electricity supplies. Now, America's high living standards have disappeared. The reliability of electricity supply is about to disappear, too. The conceit, propagated by Harvard, popularized by Carter and company, and enforced by the environmentalists and the Wall Street banks, was that the link had been broken between growth in energy supplies, and the growth of the economy as a whole. The same babble comes from the free-marketeers, who now boast idiotically of how much they will reduce the energy content required to increase the GNP by the end of the century. Human history proves that this is nonsense. Current events prove that it is genocidal. Advances in the human condition {require} advances in the quality and amount of energy available to power the machinery on which man's continued existence depends. Conservation was tried before, by the Roman Emperor Diocletian, who banned labor-saving devices from his empire. With the fall of the Roman Empire, the population of the Mediterranean Basin collapsed by 40%, just as the populations of the developing sector are today being murdered by lack of technology. Today, the environmentalist Clean Air Act bans additions to power-generating and manufacturing capacity by ``capping'' so-called emissions. Under the act, new capacity can only be added if old capacity is withdrawn from service. This is the prescription for energy crisis now, and economic disaster a short way down the road. Since the availability of raw materials is defined by the science and technology employed to produce raw materials, any attempt to halt technology ensures that the economic cost of those raw materials increases as the resource is depleted. And thus, what is now called ``conservation'' does the reverse of what it claims to do. A society which seeks to emulate Diocletian's Rome will destroy the very basis for its own existence, as the Roman Empire did. LaRouche's alternative would provide the power needed to put the country back to work producing what it needs for itself, and as its contribution to the well-being of the rest of the world. ---- John Covici covici@ccs.covici.com