Do you know that with the money spent on the war in in Iraq we could have built the infrastructure for solar, wind, nuclear, hydrogen and bio-fuels. We spent, so far, 400 billion dollars in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And this is an unpopular war but it got funding instead of the U.S. energy sector. Imagine if we had spent this money on a fleet of solar power plants in the desert states of the west. The power could then be sent along transmission lines to the western and eastern states and alleviating their electrical burden.
What if we had spent this money on new nuclear reactors that not only could give us electricity but also break the bonds of oxygen and hydrogen in water to giving us hydrogen fuel for our future cars? I know everybody is afraid of a nuclear power plant. “The big bomb next door,” they say. But today there are designs to stop a nuclear meltdown without even throwing a button. There are plants run in Japan that use a special kind of molten metal coolant like lead and it is a good shield from radioactive particles. The power plant can run at higher temperatures and there is no radioactive coolant bi-product.
How about miles and miles of wind farms in windy states of the Midwest and northwest. It was projected that if you just took one windy western state and built many wind farms you could supply the entire country with electric power.
This image shows where the wildest winds are, dark blue, and lightest winds are, white.
What we need is a national electric authority that would have a huge discretionary budget that could fund a lot of alternative energy solutions. Make it like the space race. Big budgets and a lot of amazing ideas. With good management we could alleviate our addiction to fossil fuels and maybe save the planet from the greenhouse affect.. Instead we threw all that money at Iraq and Afghanistan and guess what, Iraq is still a mess and we haven't caught Osama bin Laden. Getting rid of Osama and his crew is a good thing but spending so much money in Afghanistan and not capturing him that just does not look good to the world or Americans.
Ah, well, maybe one day we will grow up and use our money more wisely and national resources better.
