THE THIRD WAVE
lems at its present stage of development. Conventional reactors rely on uranium, yet another exhaustible fuel, and carry safety risks that are extremely costly to overcome—if, indeed, they ever can be. No one has convincingly solved the problems of nuclear waste disposal, and nuclear costs are so high that until now government subsidies have been essential to make atomic power remotely competitive with other sources.
Fast breeder reactors are in a class by themselves. But while often presented to the uninformed public as perpetual motion machines because the plutonium they spew out can be used as a fuel, they, too, remain ultimately dependent upon the world’s small and non- renewable supply of uranium. They are not only highly centralized, incredibly costly, volatile, and dangerous, they also escalate the risks of nuclear war and terrorist capture of nuclear materials.
None of this means that we are going to be thrown back into the middle ages, or that further economic advance is impossible. But it surely means that we have reached the end of one line of development and must now start another. It means that the Second Wave energy base is unsustainable.
Indeed, there is yet another, even more fundamental reason why the world must and will shift to a radically new energy base. For any energy base, whether in a village or an industrial economy, must be suited to the society’s level of technology, the nature of production, the distribution of markets and population, and many other factors.
The rise of the Second Wave energy base was associated with society’s advance to a whole new stage of technological development. And while fossil fuels certainly accelerated technological growth, the exact reverse was also true. The invention of energy-thirsty, brute technology during the industrial era spurred the ever-more-rapid exploitation of those very fossil fuels. The development of the auto industry, for example, caused so radical an expansion of the oil business that at one time it was essentially a dependency of Detroit. In the words of Donald E. Carr, formerly an oil company research director, and author of Energy and the Earth Machine, the petroleum industry became “a slave to one form of internal combustion engine.”
Today we are once more at the edge of an historic technological leap, and the new system of production now emerging will require a radical restructuring of the entire energy business—even if OPEC were to fold its tent and quietly steal away.
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