Fast Facts from Beyond Fossil Fools

by Joe Shuster

• The world population will increase by 3 billion in the next 50 years.
  
  
• U.S. conventional oil reserves would only last 3 years at our present rate of consumption, if we stopped importing oil.

• At the world’s current rate of use of oil-30 billion barrels per year-conventional oil reserves will last 37 years. By 2044, we are bone dry.

• U.S. drivers would blow the entire ANWR reserves out of their collective tailpipes in less than one year.

• More people are killed by air pollution than auto accidents.

• Acid rain, ocean acidification and mercury pollution cost the world trillions of dollars every year.

• For every gallon of gasoline we burn, we produce about 17 pounds of CO2.

• Transitioning to all plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles will decrease the cost of driving by 80%.

• Over the 30-year transition period, we will save more than we spend on the transition.

• A 1.65-megawatt windmill produces enough electricity for approximately 450 average US homes.

• The wind energy produced worldwide through 2006 is less than 1 percent of the total energy used in the United States."

• Solar power research has helped reduce solar power costs by nearly 50% in a decade and such research is essential to making solar power more widely competitive.

• Solar alone, wind alone or solar and wind together will not totally solve our energy problems.

• The public pays some environmental price for deploying every known energy source -- even for wind and solar energy.  The best we can do is to choose wisely between the alternatives.  The worst choice is coal.  The next worse choice is oil.

• People living within 10 miles of the Three Mile Island accident received about the same radiation a person would receive from one chest x-ray. Although the accident was severe, there were no injuries and no deaths.

• A Chernobyl-like accident cannot happen in the United States because U.S. reactors are designed differently and include a containment building.

• While tragic, less than 60 people lost their lives in the Chernobyl accident. Fossil fuel pollution causes more than 2 million deaths worldwide per year.

• Only nuclear energy delivered by modern fast neutron reactors can rescue the world from energy disaster -- simple as that.

• Nuclear energy from fast neutron reactors resolves every energy issue facing the world today -- depletion of oil, pollution from fossil fuels, and even the prospect of global warming from greenhouse gases.

• GNEP will contribute to world peace because nations will have no need to fight energy wars as fossil-fuel resources run out.

• The EPA tests misrepresent the miles per gallon for cars and trucks 90 percent of the time and always in favor of the car manufacturers.

• Rather than store the waste on-site or in some repository such as Yucca Mountain for 10,000 years or more, fast neutron reactors will re-use nearly all of the waste as fuel -- the ultimate recycling process.

• More vehicles will be produced in the next 20 years than during the whole of the twentieth century.

• All-electric cars are the ultimate goal, because the fuel costs for operating all-electric cars would be 6-10 times less than the costs for operating internal combustion engines, assuming a comparable 'fuel' tax.

• According to Tesla, if one uses off-peak current at 5 cents per kilowatt hour, then the fuel cost would be approximately 1 cent  per mile."

• Any new nuclear plant will be safer and more efficient than any built in the past.  The United States has over 30 year exceptionally safe operating experience -- the safest of any industry."