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Did Turkey Point Again Take Florida to the Radioactive Brink?
As many as two million Floridians were blacked out yesterday by a series of grid malfunctions that forced shut two old atomic reactors south of Miami and renewed nightmares of a radioactive catastrophe. The chain of events should serve as yet another serious warning to those who would build still more atomic reactors in Florida and elsewhere.
The wide-ranging blackout apparently started with an accidental trip at a substation. That sabotage has been ruled out may not be all that reassuring. Countless homes and businesses were affected from the Florida Keys to as far away as Tampa, Gainesville and Daytona Beach. Frightened Floridians were trapped in elevators or abandoned offices by making their way down dark, sweltering stairwells. In Miami-Dade alone at least forty traffic accidents piled up as signals went dark.
This blackout's reach was limited by steps taken since a 2003 reactor-related grid failure in Ohio led to a massive blackout that left 50 million people without power.
But the two large reactors at Turkey Point did trip from the loss of off-site power. (For safety reasons, vital cooling systems and other critical components rely on electricity coming from sources other than the reactors.)
A far more tense shut-down came when off-site power was lost during 1992's Hurricane Andrew, whose eye passed directly over Turkey Point. At the height of the storm, communication from the control room was also dangerously lost. Tools and equipment valued at around $100 million were destroyed or simply blown away.
Andrew's epic devastation made it clear that south Florida could never be evacuated in the wake of a melt-down amidst a hurricane. After the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, the NRC adopted specifications for evacuation procedures that were simply shredded by Andrew.
But Turkey Point re-opened three weeks later. To this day, no procedures are in place that could reliably evacuate south Florida's burgeoning human population if radiation releases occurred even under optimum weather conditions, let alone amidst a major wind event.
Nonetheless, Florida Power & Light now wants to build two more reactors at Turkey Point, at a cost of some $20 billion. The generators could not come on line until sometime between 2020 and 2025.
A request for "Construction Work in Progress" (CWIP) is now before the Public Utilities Commission. CWIP would force state ratepayers to cover the cost of the reactors as they are being built. The PUC could make a decision within a month.
FPL may also seek federal loan guarantees, $18.5 billion of which were noticed in the federal Appropriations Bill passed in December, 2007. The Lieberman-Warner Global Warming bill, soon to be debated in the US Senate, may also come with hefty subsidies for projects like this one. Two more reactors have been proposed by Progress Energy for a site near one reactor already operating at Crystal River, near Tampa.
Little if any private financing is likely forthcoming for the proposed Florida reactors. But if CWIP or federal loans come through, they may be hard to stop.
New reactor construction at Turkey Point would have substantial environmental impacts on the nearby Everglades National Park. Serious questions remain about pressure put on water supplies, damage to nearby wildlife habitat, and much more. A wide range of local and national environmental groups have begun to intervene against the project.
This blackout and reactor shut down happened on a clear, calm Florida day. Had the state been getting its power from solar panels installed on buildings, a blackout like this one could never have occurred.
But with still more reactors on the drawing board, it may be only a matter of time before Florida's reactors finally do take the sunshine state into the radioactive abyss.
Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior editor of www.freepress.org.
75 Comments so far
Show AllThank you Common Dreams and Harvey Wasserman for right away reporting on what was the cause of the nuclear power problem in Florida yesterday. Good job. Keep us informed on what is of importance. Thanks.
What? no... Nuclear is where we should have went in the 60's and 70's. We wouldn't be in near the trouble we are in now. Not only would we not be cripplingly addicted to foreign energy sources we might not even be at war with Iraq and even Al Queda for that matter. We would have had no use to have our troops throughout the region, no use for CIA lead coups, and we wouldn't have had the 'blowback' that lead us down this road.
It is infinitely more clean and maintainable than most other sources of energy and is the most economically viable alternative to natural gases or oil. The advancedment in the science behind this could have been exponential if we would have left the free-market and private sector dictate energy policy.
-James
www.thepoliticus.org
The title to this article is pure fear-mongering at its worst. I have not heard any news accounts that spoke of any safety issues at Turkey Point arising from the grid issues in Florida yesterday. The blackout occurred due to a failure and a fire at an electrical substation. Such substations are all over the electric grid, not just associated with nukes. Nuclear plants in the US are designed to trip ("scram") on a loss of offsite power to the plants' safety systems. This is done to separate the safety systems from an unstable grid so that emergency generators can supply power to support the safety systems, if needed. In an event like yesterday's, no safety systems were needed at Turkey Point because there was no safety event at those plants.
This being said, however, should not be read as an endorsement of nuclear energy. But a more cogent article would address questions as to how a decaying electrical grid throughout our country puts all of us at risk of blackouts. To jposty I would say that failures from old electrical infrastructure is exactly what we should expect when the free-market and private sector have their way. Instead of maintaining and enhancing infrastructure, the markey favors greater profit. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" may be good for the bottom line, but doesn't do a lot for reliability.
Also, again to jposty, the latest costs associated with wind generation place it exactly where electrical costs from nuclear are today - in the 8 to 12 cents per kilowatt hour range. But while the cost for wind generation will go down as the technology matures, the cost of uranium will only go up as more nukes come on line.
The answers to the US electrical needs do not lie in more nukes at huge cost with safety and environmental issues, but from new technologies such as wind and solar generation. And as in everything else American, if we were less profligate in our use of electricity (indeed, in all forms of energy) we would need less, from whatever sources.
I thought the wind had blown a tree into a power line when it happened but found it was everywhere.
I don't suppose the full story will get out simply because it involves Nuclear Plants...top secret now for Homeland Security.
That is only one of the huge problems with this type of power.
The waste will always be a target for terror and can't be safely handled as it is trucked across the country and the world.
To build any more nuke plants like these in the Sunny State is a crime.
The mining and refining of the ore is very bad for the environment,
It is only clean and safe if you hide the risk and pollution factors that go into getting the fuel and disposing of the waste and of course they are gonna say that the plants will be safe from accidents, but the impossibility of evacuation makes it imperative for them to maintain that story. just one hijacked load of waste would be material for thousands of dirty bombs.
jposty: "if we would have left the free-market and private sector dictate energy policy"? Huh? I think you're posting on the wrong page buddy. More nuclear material in the world doesn't equate to peace and environmental stability. Nice try, but I think you need to rethink your opinion. We've seen what a good job the "free-market" has done being responsible both economically and environmentally with fossil fuels, so what makes you think they would be any better with free reign on nuclear energy? Go back to the Chicago school of economics.
$20 Billion will buy solar electric systems for a million homes at 20 grand each, and wouldn't take 12+ years to deploy. Florida has an abundance of sunshine year round. Why are they even considering nuclear?
"Why are they even considering nuclear?"
Due to a email glitch at the White House and RNC, the records for that decision are still missing.
The beauty of Nuclear in anything is it automatically becomes a black hole of secrecy.
The solution?
Trust the government is not telling you anything for your own good.
To all the anti-free trade people out there... we haven't actually had a free-market or free-trade in quite sometime. Multinational corporations bought politicians to regulate their competition. The competition in retaliation did the same... now you have a system that breeds corruption and rewards the status-quo. There hasn't been incentive enough for corporations to try new and better ideas. If you would take the corporations out of government, then downsized government... the free markets would work. Corporations would once again need to be competitive in both prices and technology to be solvent.
-James
www.thepoliticus.org
jposty: Enough with your right-wing Libertarian hog wash! "We haven't actually had a free-market or free-trade in quite sometime." Really? Tell that to Chile, Russia, Poland, and every other country your econimic free-for-all philosophy has been imposed and failed. Your anti-government stance is simply anti-American in my opinion. We need more regulation, not less, especially when it comes to energy.
OK James,
Should we do that after we build more nukes or before?
The other part of solar and wind energy superiority is the decentralization of production and distribution that would occur. Sending energy over thousands of miles of wire is a waste.
Instead of spending billions of dollars to build nuclear and coal plants, and rebuilding our electric lines, we could have local production and distribution with energy conservation making up the difference.
greener,
That sounds like a plan!
Saying nuclear is part of a free market is about as wrong as one can get. Notice it will have to be financed by us, and will require loan guarantees financed by us. Also check on FPL. It seems they are investing in solar heat electricity generation big time. This type investment is much closer to free market, because they will be in competition with other sources of renewable energy, will rely on invention and entrepreneurship and efficiency, none of which big oil and nuclear will tolerate. Think $40 billion profits for Exxon.
Greenerthanthou is right! Decentralization is the key. Every home needs it's own private power source. The centralized ideology of public energy utilities is 20th Century. Conservation will play an enormous role contrary to the psycho babble of the right.
More folks have died in Ted Kennedy's Olds than in any US nuke plant.
jposty wrote: "The advancedment in the science behind this could have been exponential if we would have left the free-market and private sector dictate energy policy."
Nuclear power is an abject economic failure. The "free market" -- eg. Wall Street investors -- won't touch it. Nuclear power is and has always been completely dependent on massive government subsidies and government insurance against the catastrophic risks of a nuclear power plant accident. Nuclear power is, in fact, the very epitome of a Soviet-Stalinist era state-run industry. It is the furthest thing from a "free market" industry imaginable. That's why the nuclear industry is presently focused on getting hundreds of billions of dollars of new subsidies, loan guarantees and liability insurance from the Federal government -- much of which they got in the 2005 Energy Bill. The nuclear industry will not even break ground for the construction of one single new nuclear power plant unless the taxpayers absorb all the costs and all the risks.
With all due respect, you really don't know what you are talking about. If energy policy had been left up to the free market, without government intervention, there would be no nuclear industry.
RusSCF February 27th, 2008 1:42 pm
$20 Billion will buy solar electric systems for a million homes at 20 grand each, and wouldn't take 12+ years to deploy. Florida has an abundance of sunshine year round. Why are they even considering nuclear?
I was thinking the same thing about the $20 billion expenditure. Florida probably has some good sites for windmills too. You as well as I know why they consider nuclear. They're greedy SOBs that love centralized power generation to ensure profits and government subsidies. Sickening!
SecularAnimist -while I'm sure by your name we might disagree and many issues I must stand with you 100% on your statement above.
If there was a free market in energy (my goal) than renewables (solar, wind, hydrogen fuel) would be dominant. Its the heavy subsidation of stupid energy policies (like ethanol) that have us at the brink of enslavement.
It looks like everything worked the way it should. FPL is one of the better run utilities. They have to keep everything up to snuff because of the long hot/humid summers and incredible number of lightning strikes. I recall they won the Malcolm Baldridge national quality award some years ago.
SecularAnimist: I agree that nuclear power does depend on the public pocketbook, but maybe the underwriting shouldn't be left just to the utilities. Overall it is a project more on the scale of a space progam, air force or navy. Maybe the technicians operating the plants should have military type training on standardized equipment, and report to a government agency instead of utility management.
People are getting creative with nuclear power, especially abroad. We may soon see 30 year no maintenance "nuclear batteries" that can power a remote town, nuclear powered cargo and passenger ships, "fast reactors" that use almost no fuel and leave only short-lived waste, hydrogen generation from water...
So jposty sort of has a point in that much of this was delayed by fear of nuclear power, reaction to the accidents at Chernobyl and TMI, construction cost overuns, cheap fossil fuel energy, and unawareness of global warming. We would have already made a big dent in GHG emissions if the nuclear industry had grown over the past 30 years instead of coal fired.
Interesting that "they" have ruled out sabotage yet have not reported the actual cause of the reactor shut down. Failsafes are in place precisely because nuclear power is so dangerous. But apparently, two other reactors, hundreds of miles away, one in Crystal River and another in St. Lucie were also shut down yesterday. It's safe to assume, we will never read or hear about the true problem that lead to 3-4 million Floridians going without power. If this were not a safety issue, why would it not be a news story? I'm a Naples, FL. resident and there is no information regarding cause... Would the media withhold information from it's citizenry? Of course not...
jposty also is dead on about influencing congressional decisions which is how the nuke industry operates.
Taxpayers pay the clean-up.
-----
Turkey point was built before I left S. Florida in 74. It's about time to retire the radioactive monster. What are we going to do with it for the next several thousand years?
Nuclear power will NEVER be safe. NEVER.
There will NEVER be a solution to storing the waste, either. NEVER EVER.
Isn't that obvious?
Laughable. Really not worth the time to comment on an obvious anti-nuclear propaganda hit piece like this which targets .........(nevermind). A controlled shut down for safety reasons, such as due to a power interruption, is not a danger. Fear sells I guess. Big Oil must be nervous.
g l tirebiter said, "More folks have died in Ted Kennedy's Olds than in any US nuke plant."
What he really meant to say was that more people have been killed by Laura Bush's car than in any US nuke plant.
You just have to laugh at conservative free-market crybabies like james, who think the market will solve all their problems.
James, when the corporations and other zero-sum entities are properly caged by the government then we find the markets start producing the most sustainable and beneficial output. When the government is upholding its charter it ensures that consumers are able to demand and get production that's in the society's better interests. The people are given the full costs of each energy option in its retail price, and they select the best option and a limit on their consumption to sustain the health of the biosphere and the society. In such a scenario, nuclear energy ranks well below wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, etc, for a number of reasons, technical and political.
One of the problems that most recently comes to light for many is the effect that externalized energy costs have on the population. They pay for nuclear energy in ways they don't even realize, while becoming addicted to energy gluttony. This leaves them enslaved to the elites and forced to go along with ever-escalating imperial misadventures and catastrophes, wildly idiotic misallocation and plunder of resources, unsustainable debt, total neglect of very easily solvable problems, on and on and on. It's much better to hand the responsibility to the people and local-scale renewable energy is the way to do it.
Myrtle wrote: There will NEVER be a solution to storing the waste, either.
The Mb 6.3 earthquake near Wells, NV may likely put the death grip on Yucca Flat for waste storage. Not reported widely in the news, Nevada was chosen for waste storage because of the Basin and Range geological province. Geodetically, there is no strain (due to extensional forces) in B&R, so people thought it "safe" for millions of years. The Wells event has geophysicists hopping to understand why a significant earthquake occurred in a region with no stress. These things are not new: Intra-plate earthquakes occur in the middle of plates where the stress field is zero. A great example is central Australia, specifically, central Northern Territory. There was a series of Mb 7+ earthquakes in 1989 (?), a place where no earthquakes have been recorded, but Aboriginal Dreamtime have long called the area "Warramunga", which means "The Land that Moves".
No one actually knows the number who have died at an early age from cancers which were caused from atomic pollution and radiation sickness. ___ It is just another death from cancer.
Would someone send Barack Obama this article?
thanks
Yucca mountain is a joke. There is no safe place to store radioactive nuclear waste. ___ No place. ___Google nuclear accidents,___ then read the well documented and credible horror stories of nuclear waste accidents.
Funny but true. At Oak Ridge Tenn, building alarms go off frequently. The usual cause is someone entered the building who had inadvertently stepped in Goose shit. The Geese around there are so loaded with atomic toxins, that their shit is deadly nuclear waste. Not Ha-Ha funny though.
Why, did Ted offer to give Obama a ride?
FP&L actually won a Deming prize, the coveted Japanese quality prize. I think they won it in 1987. I haven't heard whether they have actually been keeping up on their quality stuff since then.
Actually, if they're as high-quality as Japanese utilities, like Kansai Electric, and Nuclear is as safe as its boosters say, they should be able to insure new power plants without government support.
Oh, so they won a prize from the Japanese for safety? Do some research and you will find the nuclear industry in Japan is notorious for concealment of nuclear 'incidents', including the one that just occurred there recently. Because of the massive amounts of taxpayer funded, corporation benefitting plans involved with the latest 'surge' in nuclear power generation/construction do you really suppose a corporate controlled MSM would report ANYTHING, or article, that jeopardizes the people or hundreds of billions (even trillions) involved? Certainly not, because the game is rigged from the top on down.
What I find particularly baffling, after researching wave & tidal power potential, and being aware of how much ocean exposure Florida has, is why the people there don't tap this easily available resource. I'm not stupid, though, and to answer my own query I'm fully aware BIG energy & BIG money will conspire to block any rational solutions (including funding) that threatens anything that keeps them from lining their greedy pockets.
More Nuclear plants?---costly, dangerous, absurd
Clean coal?---no such animal
Ethanol?---potentially starves 100,000,000+ people by trading food for fuel
Oil?---we've seen what a mess it has caused & will continue to cause (the cost of our mid-east fiasco was recently re-estimated at over $3 trillion...imagine if even a small percentage had been directed toward Appollo Alliance type projects...what an enormously criminal misuse of blood & treasure)
In congress yesterday I couldn't believe my ears when a clear thinker got up and said there was enough geothermal energy, using already existing technology, to meet our total power needs for well over a thousand years. He said there were even plans for a demonstration project right in Washington DC. Why not? Geothermal power is available beneath all 50 states, some have more & more easily reached, but ALL states have it available.
Geothermal?---good, green, & available
Wave & tidal?---good, green, & available
Wind?---good, green, & available
Solar?---good, green, & available
Bio-mass?---good, green, & available
Hydro-electric?---good (though about at max capacity), green, & available
Various other budding technologies?---good, green, and increasingly available
The stumbling blocks are politics, public awareness of better options, existing corporate dominance, and primarily FUNDING. For the seriously misguided poster above who claimed if we had only been funding nuclear back in the '60's & '70's, I would like to point out that if we had only funded 'green' technologies (most of which were feasible even then), by even a fraction of taxpayer funded subsidies nuclear, oil, & coal have soaked us for, this whole argument would be moot.
Conservation should be our immediate primary target (much increased CAFE standards, building codes modified, changes in the way we light, heat, and work in buildings, increased availability to mass transportation, and a paradigm shift in the belief everyone needs/deserves/should have their own car/truck). I wonder how many people even realize that if we had increased our MPG by 25% ten years ago (which could have been done) we wouldn't even need ANY middle eastern oil at all.
But noooo, Detroit & Americans went in the opposite direction with the archaic 'bigger is better' mentality. When Hummers came out, and congress voted tens of thousands of dollars in tax credits for purchasing one of the damned unnecessary things, the writing was on the wall we were all pretty much screwed. What a gluttonous ego trip they are. Now if they were going down the road with all the seats filled there might be some validity in owning one, but most I see have just the driver, and MAYBE one passenger. If it weren't so tragic for the thousands of lives harmed by auto makers' un-patriotic foolishness/unresponsiveness, it would be easy to say the hell with the Big Three. After the Arab oil embargo of the early '70's they acted in the same manner, producing more big old gas guzzling land yachts, and that's why the Germans & Japanese, with smaller economical vehicles, ate their lunch.
Along with conservation we should be redirecting funding away from nuclear & oil. The big 5 oil companies made a profit of over a hundred billion dollars last year so if they want money for new exploration & upgrades let them spend their own dime. Worldwide, renewables are producing more power than ALL nuclear plants (as of 2005) so why spend $20 billion for two more nuke plants in Florida alone. Re-direct these funds toward something ecologically & financially sound...and sustainable. Nuclear technologies have received at least 20 times the funding 'green' has gotten, but what if we reversed those figures? This would certainly put the lie to the other congressman who claimed by 2030 only 20% of our power would come from renewables.
Making the shift won't be easy, but it is necessary. If we don't communally see the light there probably won't be any ;-)
PAUL MAGILL SMITH: Excellent posting!
Yesterdays paper said that the nuke plants that were shut down for saftey reasons were still not up yet.
I guess it takes time for them to restart which will be a problem that they will most likely solve to save money next time by not having the nuke plants shut down the next time a fire which they haven't investigated yet or anything odd trips the nuclear shut down.
this is kinda crazy..
Yes this is anti nuke article... I am glad!
Good one Paul. You forgot the most important thing though---reversing overpopulation.
PaulMagillSmith
Excellent comments against the insanity of nuclear power-!!
Solar, Wind, etal --- do not require evacuation plans ---
which are unrealistic at any rate!
During the Enron "corruption/crisis" in California, they built wind energy which within 3 to 4 months brought more than 140,000 families power.
Again --- NO EVACUATION PLAN NEEDED . . . !!!
I do wish Common Dreams would publish Paul Magill Smith's comments, and leave them as the lead article for a month or so.
IT SEEMS THAT THERE IS SO MUCH THAT WE COULD DO TOWARDS THIS NEW RESILIENT ENERGY GOAL.. IT COULD GIVE US JOBS AS RE BUILDERS... FIXIN AMERICA!
Thanks for all the great ideas.
who wants to be stuck in peak oil now?
Hi ~EZEFLYER ~ You got it, over-population. Of course Paul is aware of that too. But don't worry about that, we won't be over-populated when that Arctic methane gas erupts in a few short years.___ And it will, because the great points Paul M Smith made won't be addressed in time to prevent it.
Well, Jim Glover, I would probably say the Rothschilds, because they value any world turmoil so they can loan money with usury & sell weapons to both sides in a conflict, the queen of England since she has uranium holdings of $5-10 billion and becoming more valuable, and the oil companies since shorter supply increases price.
The MIC make out like bandits for obvious reasons, politicians get bigger bribes (excuuuse me...donations) from lobbiests to fight positions unpopular with the people, and this means the MSM gains from increased political advertising, then again there's Saudi Arabia & Kuwait with an elite laughing all the way to the bank (probably a Rothschild bank at that), as well as the Isrealis who gain by having the US do all the dirty work fighting the enemies surrounding them. It's a real mess we must straighten out now, isn't it?
@PaulMcgillSmith
Nice post, but there is a fundamental flaw in your argument. Its called physics. Specifically, laws relating to thermodynamics.
While we can believe that there are all these nice green sources of energy out there, transformation into a form of energy that we can use is not 100% efficient. At best, green sources of energy are maybe 40% efficient. The other nearly 60% is transformed into heat, due to frictional losses. Uh-oh. Heat. Heat is a 4-letter word.
Our global dilemma of climatic warming due to green-house emissions means that heat is trapped and cannot radiate into space. This applies to both solar irradiation, but also heat generated by human inefficiencies. So the more heat generated by man, the more heat is trapped. It is this heat that exacerbates climatic warming.
There appears to be general consensus amongst planetary specialists that we have reached a tipping point that suggests even if we completely stopped generating green-house gases, our climate will continue to warm because of solar insolation and the heat that man generates. This is because man is a significant contributor to the Earth's heat budget. As an aside, replacing forests with concrete is also bad for the heat budget, but that is another lesson.
Physics is often lost on alternate-energy supporters. I'm not knocking them, I'm all for green energy. BUT the most important challenge we need to face is to REDUCE both our energy needs and consumption, not meet our current demands. Concentrating on finding green sources of energy to meet our demands is a dangerous distraction.
WTF. Are you sayng burning coal or oil or gas, is little worse than clean energy?
What I understnd about global warming is, the excessive amount of Co2 in the atmosphere is trapping heat. It is not the heat we produce, it is the fact that heat we do produce, cannot escape our biosphere properly through the upper atmosphere, because of excessive Co2 in the atmosphere, thus the Greenhouse effect.
I really do believe a wind, or geo-thermal, or a tidal/wave power plant, that produced as much electrical energy as a coal fired plant, would produce far, far less heat and Co2. Therefore, I do not understand your comments. __ At all. Sorry, but I can find no fault whatsoever with Paul Smith's comments.
What I am sayng is ~WTF~, if we replace goal, oil, and gas generation power plants for electrical power, we will greatly reduce Co2 in the atmosphere. That of course is not enough, we must also have electrical powered vehicles. Our vehicles produce half of the Co2 humanity currently produces. If we use clean energy to charge electric vehicles, we don't produce any Co2. After the atmosphere has a chance to clean up, the heat we produce will be able to escape our biosphere as it should.
Thanks, KEM, I appreciate your support. At the same time you must realize, although WTF might not have read my post thoroughly about my take on 'conservation is the prime consideration', we are basically in agreement. Where we might disagree is about minimal warming vs. massive warming. Since we have to pretty much accept the fact of 6.5+ billion people now alive on this earth, whether we can control GHG is an entirely different issue from human generated heat. Others have posted on various threads about the massive amounts of heat & steam emmitted by/from nuclear power plant towers. I agree, but do you really expect these plants to try to capture this wasted heat (that could possibly heat hundreds or thousands of homes) when they are in the BUSINESS of selling heating to customers? I think we all know better than believing there is ANY free lunch given away by corporate American giants.
WTF, I think some research might be in order for you determine which is the greater threat...human generated heat, or human generated GHG's. KEM & I have been here before, and we await the results of your search/research...with links to reputable sources, of course.
I watched a "Green Energy" program on the science channel last night and it was very interestiong and informative. Jay Leno for instance, powers his huge 100+ antique vehicle garage with wind power only, and sells the excess power his multi bladed power plant produces to the power commpny.
Cargo ships use huge wind sails, which are tethered to the ship with a carbon fiber rope and sail up to altitudes of over 1,000 feet. The sails, whch are very simular to the new para-gliding chutes, reduce the use of diesel fuel by over 60%. Presently there are over 40,000 such cargo ships and if all used those wind sails, they would reduce the burning of diesel fuel by billions of gallons a year.
Solar power towers in Spain are developing electrical power for cities and homes of up to 60,000 homes. There are new types of wind generated power plants that will make the three propellor bladed types obsolete and the new ones are far more effecient and effective and have zero Co2 emissions.
There are many ways we could end the use of burning coal and oil, if we don't do it, we will destroy the life on our planet. We do not have another one to live on.
We and other nations should tax those who have the opportunity to use such items as the wind power sails for cargo ships. That technology is proven, is affordable and the use of such reduces Co2 in the atmosphere. Therfore, if a ship does not use the sails, they should be heavily taxed for any diesel fuel they purchase. Say an additional $5.00 a gallon fuel tax.
KEM, you might also want to take a look at this innovative sail design...Flettner rotor ship...invented & applied in the early part of last century. It was even demonstrated on cargo ships & freighters of the time, but I believe it fell out of favor, just as sailing ships in general, because of increased ship weight, decreased fuel costs, and the 'need for speed'.
The nice thing about it is it's a sail that can sail into the wind, rather than pushed by the wind from behind.
It's controlled by computer, connected to GPS and as I saw it, the ship sailed a perfectly straight course, in fact even better than by a helmsman. They don't shut down the ships engines with the use of the sail, just reduce throtle by 50 to 60% and maintain normal cruising speed. I would imagine a pair of sails could be used.
I remember those tube sails on large ships Paul, they worked very well, and were one of Jacques Costeau's themes. Of course then diesel was not a high cost factor and Co2 in the atmosphere was not an issue.