Watts up.(Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Energy Odyssey)(Book review)

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Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Energy Odyssey, by William Tucker (Bartleby, 420 pp., $27.50)

FITTINGLY for a book about nuclear energy, William Tucker's latest work is a bit like uranium: It contains a vast amount of material, packed tightly into a small space, which, if released into the population at large, could generate substantial energy. Like nuclear energy, it is not without its problems, but they are easily overcome. And it will go down like a nuclear bomb with environmentalists, because it ably demonstrates that their energy arguments are worthless.

Tucker neatly divides energy sources into two types: solar and terrestrial. For virtually all of mankind's history, we have derived our power from the liberation of solar energy--energy from the sun's rays that has been captured by plant life. Initially, we used wood, releasing its stored solar energy in the form of fire. More recently, we discovered a much more concentrated form of solar energy in fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. The amount of concentrated solar energy in these fuels is amazing. One gallon of gasoline can propel a 3,000-pound vehicle for about 30 miles, a task that would exhaust large numbers of human beings.

Terrestrial power, on the other hand, derives its energy from the processes going on beneath our feet. Anyone who has been down a deep mineshaft knows how hot it gets down there. This is because we are nearer the areas where large amounts of uranium and thorium (left over from the Earth's creation from the remnants of a supernova, Tucker suggests) are decaying, releasing heat. By simply taking those elements out of the ground and using them to fuel power stations, just as we have done with coal for so long, we can release an even more concentrated form of energy. The energy binding the elements of that gallon of gasoline together would, if we could tap them, propel that vehicle for 60 million miles--the distance between the Earth and Mars.

Yet we are bypassing this magnificent alternative. In our search for other sources of energy we have again concentrated on solar forms. Wind power is actually the result of differences between the amounts of solar heat gathered in different parts of the atmosphere. Hydroelectric power ultimately derives from the sun's evaporating water from the oceans, which then returns to the earth as rain, which then seeks a quick return to the oceans. Even biofuels are simply a method of liberating solar energy without going through the concentration process of creating fossil fuels.

This is where, to my mind, the book is most valuable, for in its extensive discussion of the so-called "renewable" fuels, it lays bare the reasons why all the talk of environmentalists about them is just so much hype. Time and again the name of Amory Lovins, the sage of the Rocky Mountain Institute (a prominent sustainable-resources think tank), and his assertions that renewable energy is best come up. Time and again it is shown how one of his pilot programs seems to have enough potential that governments sink our money into it. And time and again Tucker demonstrates how such schemes just will not work at the scale we need them to.