Word: coal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...than double the annual appropriation for defense spending.) Instead, the oil companies may well choose to buy up other energy producers, giving them even greater control of our energy future, while doing almost nothing to help increase energy production. Eleven oil companies already own 25 per cent of the coal industry, according to a September 1979 issue of Business Week, and are beginning to buy up the best small solar firms, jeopardizing the future of competition in the energy field...
...proposal is similar to one made recently by scientists in the U.S.S.R. to their own government. Last week Soviet energy specialists disclosed that eventually all of the U.S.S.R.'s oil-fueled plants, which generate about 30% of the country's electricity, will be replaced with nukes or coal-fired plants. The Soviet Union now has about 25 nuclear plants, second only to the U.S., which has 72. By 1981 the Soviets expect to have eight additional large ones in operation...
...that utilities must borrow to build plants. One example: the estimated cost of Long Island Lighting Co.'s Shoreham, N.Y., plant has quintupled from $300 million to $1.5 bil lion during the ten years it has been under construction. Nuclear plants now operating produce electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power stations (1.50 per kw-h for nuclear in 1978, vs. 2.30 for coal), but the cost of finishing those now under construction will be so enormous that there is some question whether that competitive advantage can be maintained...
Relying on imported oil opens the U.S. to economic and political blackmail. Coal can replace uranium as a power-plant fuel, but only at the price of severe environmental damage: a steady, though undramatic, toll of respiratory ailments among the people who breathe the air near a coal-fired plant, and the long-range possibility of a ''greenhouse effect'' in the atmosphere that could cause an irreversible change in the earth's climate...
Fortunately, the only obstacle that means anything to oil companies--cost--may be decisive in the future of synthetic fuels. Cost estimates for liquefied coal have climbed from $7.50 per barrel of oil equivalent in 1973 to $20 in 1977, and they are still rising. Nevertheless, oil companies have pushed synthetic fuels as the solution to America's problem of dependence on OPEC. And President Carter's proposal for an $88 billion investment in synfuels shows that he swallowed the oil company line...