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Should Alternative Energy Replace Nuclear in Belgium? |
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Should Alternative Energy Replace Nuclear in Belgium? |
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Here would be a link to a web page that deals with a (not necessarily very closely) related topic, and links to this page.
These energies have in common their blamelessness
in the 1956 mass death of workers at the Marcinelle coal mine.
People living in Belgium may know of more recent disasters
that similarly could not have happened in an all-alternative
or all-nuclear 
.
They also have in common the property of producing useful energy from sources that are difficult to tax. A tonne of nuclear fuel for a Belgian reactor is enriched from about seven tonnes of natural uranium, market value about US$200,000. The finished fuel rods may be worth five times that. Surely, on a million-dollar job, there is lots of tax payable?
Yes, there surely is, but nothing like what $4 million in coal, or $10 million in natural gas, or $20 million in petroleum can bring in. And those are indeed the rough equivalencies. More accurate calculation would still reveal the same fact: for governments, and those funded by them, fossil fuels are tremendously more lucrative than nuclear fuel.
When nuclear energy and alternative energy both replace hydrocarbons,
tax takers lose hugely.
On the other hand,
if nuclear energy is replaced by alternative energy,
they lose only the relatively tiny nuclear fuel .
So the question, "Should alternative replace nuclear", looks very much like a divide-and-conquer tactic on their part -- also known as "Let's you and him fight".
A useful response to those promoting the question therefore is, "No. What is your interest in preventing them both from replacing coal, oil, and natural gas?".
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Could a country's power be all nuclear, or all aeolian, or all solar? An idea of very long standing says Yes, it could, if power came to stationary loads as electrical power, and to vehicles as intermittent streams of hydrogen. Vehicles would have to be motionless, connected to special plumbing, while hydrogen was streaming into them, but in between times they could unhook and roam about, turning the acquired hydrogen back into water vapour and releasing it. Such is the innocuousness of this substance that one can dump it in the atmosphere and still be considered zero-emission. Hydrogen has long been produced on a fairly large scale, hundreds of kilotonnes annually, from coal, oil, and natural gas. They are hydrocarbons; they contain it. So the zero-local-emission advantage that its use as motor fuel could bring has long been available. However, out of the many hundreds of millions of cars that have been made, only a few dozen prototypes have ever run on hydrogen. Three major difficulties that have helped limit the attractiveness of hydrogen motoring are the very limited degree to which hydrogen can be made dense (so that enough of it can fit on board vehicles to propel them worthwhile distances), the energy cost of even that limited volume reduction, and its tendency, as a gaseous fuel, to form explosive fuel-air mixtures when it leaks. There is an interesting possibility that another chemical element can stand in for hydrogen and eliminate all three problems. It may make possible zero-local-emission vehicles that motorists will like at least as well as today's hydrocarbon burners. Read more here: Since fossil hydrocarbon fuels do not contain boron, transforming their energy into boron-borne energy would be a process without the shortcuts that are possible with hydrogen. But energy in sunlight, thorium, uranium, and wind has no such shortcuts to any element, no preference for being channelled through any particular zero-emission fuel. Return to main text
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There are some other possibilities that would work out to no loss of tax revenue at all. One is that in order to effect the proposed replacement of nuclear energy by alternative energy, it is also proposed to subsidize the alternative energy, from taxes, and it is expected the alternative energy providers' hog-trough will be so generously filled that lots will slop over. Another, less pleasant swindle that has been executed with success on more than one past occasion is to limit or roll back nuclear energy while saying alternative energy will replace it, and when alternative energy does not in fact replace it, to continue to cash one's government cheques, now ampler than they might have been because of the replacement of nuclear energy by hydrocarbon energy. This is money gained at the cost of others' lives. Return to main text
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