75-05-A2
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Energy Sources
TranscriptDoes America have a shortage of energy or a surplus of government? I'll be right back. As the Administration and Congress alternately argue and agree on what energy taxes to impose and what energy regulations to decree, it's not hard to believe that our energy problem can be summed up in one word shortage. If we're really in danger of running out of energy sources then government policy should be to discourage both use and increase production. This is what the programs of both the administration and Congress are all about. The truth is precisely the reverse. Petr Beckmann, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, spelled it out in a recent magazine article. The true long-run solutions to the energy problem, Dr. Beckmann says, are solar energy and nuclear fusion which is different and far more economical than the nuclear fission used in our present atomic power plants. The source of fusion is water, the source of solar energy is the sun. The sun is scheduled to shine for another 50 billion years and fusion will be not only possible but cheap so long as water is in our oceans. So much for a long-range shortage but according to most estimates fusion and solar energy can't be brought into widespread use for another 30 years. More conventional sources of power will be needed in the meantime. Now here are some of the facts Dr. Beckmann cites. We have enough coal to last several centuries. We have enough uranium to fuel hundreds of new power plants. On our continental shelves we have an estimated 100 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. We have more oil in the oil shale of the mountain states than there is in the entire Middle East. The problem is not a lack of energy, it is government regulations which deter rather than promote the extraction of it. For example, oil now has a two-tier price structure which tends to reward those who produce a little oil and penalizes those who produce a lot. The price of oil extracted from new wells is more than twice as high as the regulated price of oil from old wells. In 1974 the number of new wells drilled lept to more than 30 thousand yet overall production is lower than it was before the 1973 embargo. The reason is simple, because of the two-tier price structure a producer makes more money producing 10 barrels a day from a new well than from producing 15 barrels a day from an old well. As Beckmann says, quote, "If government decrees fixed the price of potatoes grown in fields but allowed a free market in potatoes grown in flower pots, there would be a flower pot potato boom but the total potato production would decline." Unquote. The so-called dangers of nuclear power plants are another thing that has affected government policy but the accident rate in coal mines is 100 times higher than a nuclear power plants per unit of energy produced. And the next time you take a jet flight you'll receive a hundred times more radiation than you will from a lifetime of exposure to nuclear plants. Truths like these are too often lost in hysteria but the one truth we shouldn't forget is this: if we relax government controls on our natural gas, nuclear plants, oil shale and offshore drilling, we won't have to talk about invading the Middle East. Instead we could surpass the Middle East as the world's chief exporter of energy. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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