S O U N D   O F F

February 23, 2011

A conversation between Dr. Mike Fox and Dr. Gordon Fulks

One will always err, if one expects some intelligence out of the Sierra Club, or the other greens. Invariably in these discussions with such greens they will shade (or distort) the truth. They have agendas.

I have my own Boardman story. If one has the time one will observed a very long coal train pulling into the Boardman plant daily. In round numbers, and assuming that there are 10,000 Btu/lb of coal (it varies a bit from 8500 Btu/lb for sub-bituminous to about 15000 Btu for anthracite, when available), the coal train will be about 60 100 ton coal cars everyday, or 6000 tons/day.

If Boardman were a nuclear power plant of the same capacity (560MW(e), a 2 YEAR supply of nuclear fuel could be hauled in once on a couple of flatbed trucks. The energy density of U-235 (when in the form of nuclear fuel) is about 2 million times that of coal. The waste volumes from nuclear plants will be correspondingly smaller, as the French learned 30 years ago, and few air emissions. The French vitrify their wastes producing about 5 cu yds of such waste per YEAR!!

The Sierra Club and the other greens opposed these too, for 40 years. Not very bright people, and have dangerous energy economy-killing agendas. I've debated a number of these guys, when they will show up. Floyd Marbet made a mistake one time and showed up to debate me in the Senate chambers in Salem. Ya shoulda been there!! Marbet lost it, in front of about 300 people from all over the nation.

I am a staunch supporter of the Boardman coal plant, and the Centralia plant as well. They do a great job in their air cleanup systems, electrostatic precipitators (removes 98-99% of the solid dust). and I think some baghouses and scrubbers as well. We are sitting on one of the largest coal reserves in the world.

Mike
former member of the Sierra Club.
_____________________________________________________________________________

Dear Dr. Mike,

Thanks for your support of the PGE Boardman coal-fired power plant. Thanks also to Robert Benze and Kathleen Worman. Coal may not be the most glamorous way to produce electricity, but it is by far the mainstay of the United States electric grid. Over the long term, we could probably do as well or better with nuclear power. The French have proved that. But we should not scrap our perfectly serviceable coal-fired power plants, just because James Hansen characterizes them as 'evil.' Anyone who has heard him speak knows that he has a few screws loose.

My preference would be to use our vast coal reserves as a feedstock for the liquid fuels that we and other nations now purchase from rogue regimes around the world. But I would never argue that we should just walk away from our perfectly serviceable coal-fired power plants. That's madness.

I have long experience with the Sierra Club and found them just as unable to grasp issues decades ago as they are today. Actually, I used to climb mountains in California with the Sierra Peaks Section of the Sierra Club, and they were good people. But the general membership is so thoroughly purist and politicized that they are completely unable to address real world problems. Even the mainstream Democrats with whom I worked in Santa Barbara were disgusted with the attitude of the Sierra Club, because they would not support anything practical, even to the point of losing everything. In other words, they could not support engineering solutions to anything, because these involved a series of compromises. Never mind that the compromises achieved highly beneficial results that far outweighed negatives. The Sierra Club remained fanatical to the end.

This is stupidity, dangerous stupidity. The Sierra Club will sequentially block ALL practical methods of generating electricity. Their focus today is on killing coal, but they will never agree to nuclear as a carbon-free substitute or natural gas as a lesser-carbon substitute. They want only what they see as "clean power," like ethanol, wind, and solar. Never mind that these involve just as much fossil fuel as conventional power, they appear to be pure virtue without any drawbacks. That is all that is important to those with no backgrounds in science and engineering.

How long will we permit left-wing religious fanatics* to make technological and business decisions for us?

Gordon

Gordon J. Fulks, PhD
Corbett, Oregon USA

*'Environmentalism' has become a new pseudo-religion, far removed from the religions of Abraham.