Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [74]
“I wouldn’t know about those,” Gamble deadpanned.
In any case, the Navy had had no reactor accidents, and a half-century’s experience with design and operation. They discussed whether the Navy could lead the way in designing, maybe even overseeing, a number of federally funded “National Security Nuclear Plants.” That might avoid the cost-cutting disasters that free-market nuclear energy inevitably led to. It would also excuse the new power plants from those environmental regulations the military already had exemptions from. Overall those exemptions were a bad idea, but in this case, maybe not.
In effect, pursuing this plan would nationalize part of the country’s energy supply, Gamble pointed out. A bit of a Hugo Chavez move, he suggested, which would enrage the Wall Street Journal editorial page and its ilk. Between that and the environmental objections, there would be no lack of opponents to such a plan.
But the Navy, Frank suggested, had no reason to fear critics of any stripe. They did what Congress and the president asked them to do.
Gamble concurred. Then, without saying so outright, he conveyed to Frank the impression that the Navy brain trust might be happy to be tasked with some of the nation’s energy security. These days, global military strategy and technology had combined in a way that made navies indispensable but unglamorous; they functioned like giant water taxis for the other services. Ambition to do more was common in the secretary’s office, and over at Annapolis.
“Great,” Frank said. While listening to this artful description, vague but suggestive, something had occurred to him: “When there are blackouts, could the nuclear fleet serve as emergency generators?”
“Well, yes, if I understand you. They’ve done things like that before, doing emergency relief in Africa and Southeast Asia. Hook into the grid and power a town or a district.”
“How big a town?”
“The ships range from a few to several megawatt range. I think a Roosevelt-class aircraft carrier could power a town of a hundred thousand, maybe more.”
“I’d like to get the totals on that.”
Then lunch was over and it was time for 2) Air Force. A new aide appeared and escorted him around two bends of the Pentagon, to the Air Force hall. The walls here were decorated with giant oil paintings of various kinds of aircraft. Many of the gleaming planes were portrayed engaged in aerial dogfights, the enemy planes going down under curved pillars of smoke and flames. It was like being in a war-crazed teenager’s bedroom.
The Air Force’s chief scientist was an academic, appointed for a two-year stint. Frank asked him about the possibility of the Air Force getting involved in space-based solar power, and the rapid deployment thereof. The chief scientist was optimistic about this. Solar collectors doing photovoltaic in orbit, beaming the power down in microwaves to Earth, there to be captured by power plants, which became capture-and-transfer centers, rather than generating plants per se. Have to avoid frying too many birds and bees with the microwaves, not unlike the wind turbine problem in that regard, otherwise pretty straightforward, technically, and with the potential to be exceptionally, almost amazingly, clean.
But?
“You would need a big honking booster to lift all that hardware into space,” the chief scientist said. Maybe something that had horizontal takeoffs and landings both, some kind of ramjet thing. In any case a major new booster, like the old Saturn rocket, so foolishly canceled at the end of Apollo, but modernized by all that a half-century’s improvements in materials and design could give it. A good booster could make the shuttle look like the weird and dangerous contraption it had always been.
“Much progress on that, then?” Frank asked.
The matter had been studied, and some starts made, but it could not be said to be going full speed yet. Even though it was a crucial part of a full clean energy solution.
“What have people been thinking this last decade or two?” Frank wondered once. “Why not do the obvious things?”
The