Finding energy forms

Tom Layson / guest Columnist

By the time this column runs, the cost of regular unleaded gasoline will top $4 here in East Pierce County. It is just the start of our long and painful transition from a fossil-fuel based economy to a nuclear one.

Yes, renewables will play a role in our energy mix, but I doubt they’ll provide the cost-effective base load capacity required to power our all-electric future in time to replace oil.

It seems the best available resource right now is the atom. New-generation nuclear plants can be built on unproductive land, and produce few greenhouse gases. Old fears about safety and waste disposal can be largely overcome with care, new technology and the growing recognition that there are environmental costs associated with harnessing any source of energy.

When compared to the trillions of dollars spent to prop-up oil-based economies through subsidies and military force projection, the lives lost in past and future energy wars, and the environmental costs — the price of scaled-up and standardized nuclear power starts to get more attractive. We can not allow the engineering, human, policy and political failures of Chernobyl stop us.

Here in the Northwest, we’ve played a major role, and paid substantial environmental and fiscal prices for 65 years of atomic development and missteps. Shouldn’t we then position ourselves to reap the benefits of a cleaner and reinvigorated nuclear future?

In addition to a plethora of policy promoting conservation, renewables and sustainability, Washington along with its industry and human resources should also be leading the way into something like a Manhattan Project 2 — A nationally driven project to reinvent, re-engineer, standardize and redeploy nuclear power in the United States in front of what I see as the final solar solution.

When all the environmental and social costs of not pursuing nuclear are truly weighed, I wonder if this region’s green, social justice, farming, defense, engineering and computing communities might be able find common ground. Nuclear power may bring down dams, open up farmland, bring cheap power to the disenfranchised and help create the next wave of green jobs building efficient and clean electric products while perfecting solar.

Solving the energy problem will by the lynchpin in providing food security, national security, economic security, and global social justice.

In 1961, this nation embarked upon a project to land a man on the moon. The results of that program will pale in comparison to what would be achieved by answering a bold call to reinvent and redeploy this nation’s primary source of energy and share it with the world.

The only questions are: How long will we dither? How bad will we allow our environment to get as we mine, farm and burn our way down false paths? How many trillions of dollars will we waste?

Link to Tom Layson’s blog through www.winpcr.com