The only solution for Mother Earth's woes...

The most immediate technical solution to our current environmental woes would be to go completely electric. By completely I mean completely; the huge amounts of electricity needed produced by nuclear reactors. No more oil and no more gas. No more pollution and environmental damage caused during the extraction, processing and use of fossil fuels. A complete revamp of society's dependency on fossil fuels and a major economic re-think with each nation producing power for its citizens. The solution does not deal with what this will mean for fossil fuel producing nations. This is a political problem not a technical one. The good news, and there is only good news for the technical solution to our current environmental woes, is that we are capable of doing it. We can build enough non polluting, safe nuclear plants to make it happen.

Cars and motor bikes will run on electrical motors and not hybrid, as under the solution we do not want any fossil fuel based products driving our vehicles any longer. This includes the - never a great solution anyhow - biofuels, which apart from causing great environmental damage in clearing new land, also take up far too much of the existing productive land. Some leading automotive companies are currently touting passenger vehicles capable of top racing car speeds and capable of travelling 350 kilometres, a considerable distance for the average commuter, before needing a recharge. Now for a recharge; think of your mobile phone, this time the cable conveniently connecting your home grit to your car. Plugging into the main grid means many convenient recharge points such as shopping centre car parks, employee carparks or highway topup stations with the customer paying an electricity, instead of fossil fuel, bill. In emergencies you could top up at somebody’s house, getting sociable over a cup of tea whilst you wait the 10 minutes it is possible to recharge your battery today, having a friendly chat about the marvellous technological and cultural changes which have occurred recently within society.

Agricultural machinery and trucks will go the same way, using powerful electric motors. Trucking short haul, is carried on electric motor carriers, the long haul by electric rail, which would naturally need a massive expansion of an electric rail network. Which is more good news for commuters, as passengers who will be reliant on it for travel further from home, will have access to extensive long distance travel. As for the development of land operated machinery, we are close to being electrically capable of producing crops and livestock as well as transporting people and goods without any national, yet alone global, infrastructure in place; think of how fast and far we’ll be able to get by the time it is.

Transportion by sea and air of people and goods will be driven by nuclear driven jet engines, thereby becoming non polluters as well. So far the Navies of many countries have run submarines on just these engines without too many dramas and when they share their secrets (in our new much improved open society) with commercial industry this could be achieved economically and, most importantly, quickly. International co-operation in developing jet and electric power technologies for industry, agriculture, governments and the military is possible during times of cultural change, especially times when everyone, and that means literally everyone on this planet, wants a change in the way we’re doing things. Along with the great social changes brought about by the solution will be a complete overhaul of the military. The solution not allowing one rule for one and one rule for another, means they’ll have to go electric. Without oil, reliant mechanical warfare would largely become obsolete, running all those tanks, planes and ships on electricity is going to be tricky and expensive so militaries would concentrate on missiles instead. Going electric massively decreases defence budgets and provides government funds for the immediate mass development of available commercial electric and nuclear technologies.

A massive technological change, such as brought about by the solution, to a nation’s economy means major changing spending priorities for governments. Faced by a concerned populace demanding an immediate stop to the Earths destruction, more money is made available to the development and construction of the infrastructure needed to meet the urgency. Money wasted on operating and further developing fossil fuel reliant military transport, as well as developing industrial solar, wind and other alternative energy sources, is thrown, instead, into the mass electic and nuclear development and construction pot. Another hugely popular way to help raise the cash to pay for our new electric cars would be to tax the fossil fuel companies.

Since some countries are already considering taxing the emissions of their fossil fuel industries, it would only make sense to make it international and tax all commercial fossil fuel waste. A politically neutral (most un-UN like) governing body distributes the tax earnings to those nations ditching fossil fuel based economies and who develop nuclear reactors and infastructure to make an electric economy viable. Once the enormous amount of money saved on extracting and processing fossil fuels is realised, when we’ve stopped paying the fine of their pollution and when our environmentally friendly nuclear reactors are all on line, government will be able to reverse the damaged caused by the fossil fuel polluters, which includes, all of us.

What about us nuclear waste polluters? Well, global problems require global action, the solution will see all non-reusable nuclear waste, front and back end of production, buried on internationally funded sites. Even though this goes against the ‘not in my backyard’ vain running through society it can be done safely in remote geologically stable places. The same sort of places, one would imagine, governments are looking to bury the waste products of the CO2 scrubbers. As the waste can take millions of years to become inactive, it makes sense to bury it thousands of metres deep in stable, billions of years old rock on sites with no underground water movement. Happily, for us humans, these places tend to be of low economic value. Burying the waste at these sites, unlike the stop gap measures currently employed by nations faced with storage problems and despite the possibilities offered by the mixed oxide fuel burning method (which still leaves, although less toxic and non weapon grade, plutonium behind) is the least polluting and the most economically viable way to permanently and safely dispose of nuclear waste. Further, the waste disposal sites, apart from being geologically suitable, are in politically stable first-world nations with available security and technological expertise.

Most importantly though, burying the waste buys us time. Today’s technology allows us to bury the waste for ‘thousands of years.’ If we half this to allow for unforseen future blunders that will give us roughly one thousand years before the 'great unknown' really kicks in, giving us this time to allow science and technology, who are all funded up and super focussed by now, to catch up. As we've discovered since the Industrial revolution, the 'great known' is, for Mother Earth and all those who inhabit her, an absolute disaster. Fortunatly, an immediate solution for all our woes, including the disposal of our most toxic of wastes, is here, very much encouraged by recent research contemplating depositing the waste in the tectonic plates sliding into the Earths mantle. Here it would be absorbed and would come out at the other end, an oceanic ridge, diluted and chemically altered, a few million years later. This gives us more than enough time to find other ways to - if not wipe ourselves and our fellow inhabitants of the face of the planet - sort out our shit in all our dealings with our fellow humankind.

For the technical solution to Mother Earth's woes to take immediate effect, a dramatic shift will need to occur in how nuclear power is perceived by the public. This need not be difficult; not many people remember Chernobyl and there have been many advances in the safety of nuclear power stations for civilian use since. People realise the delicate equilibrium which keeps us all alive needs to be re-tipped in Mother Earth’s favour. Just like they know we need to use an alternative to fossil fuel immediately if we are to have any hope of achieving this.

With nuclear energy our land and sea scapes are wind farm-less and our deserts free of the blankets of solar panels planned to save us when it was in all probability far too late to do so. Even the amount of energy produced by the proposed environmentally friendly Geothermic method (drilling two holes deep into a heated rock layer, filling one with water and allowing the resulting super heated steam to drive generators in the other hole) would never meet the demand, even if suitable geothermic sites were easy to come by.

No, I’m afraid, for now, the solution is our only hope…