Buggy Whip Capital of the World
Hightower legacy project
The Texas governor wants Texas to be the nuclear fission plant capital of the world. He and the Public Utility Commission wants expansion of both full size nukes and the new tinier, back yard modular nukes.
On the same week that the Texas governor announced the grand Nuclear Texas plan, the newspaper carried an article on nuclear fusion. Fusion power, which carries none of the toxic waste problems of fission, is now an engineering problem, having had its successful proof of concept experiment last year.
This is not to suggest that the engineering of a nuclear fusion plant is an easy problem. Experts anticipate 10-15 years. But the WSJ article said that a real live company is raising real money to build a fusion plant in 5 years in Virginia. And real live forward thinking people are providing the real money.
Five years? Folks scoff. PHIT scoffs. But nonetheless, fusion will happen and it will happen in the next twenty years.
And when it does become successful…Nuclear fission will be obsolete. Obsolete and irrelevant except for the toxic waste that the nuclear power industry will have generated. [Please note that in the report there is no mention of what to do with the high level plutonium waste generated in fission energy.]
Even advocates of nuclear fission admit that, at best, nuclear fission is a transition industry. Fission is not the energy of the future. Fusion is the energy of the future.
When cars were invented, the buggy whip industry dried up.
Texas is now striving to become the world’s capital of buggy whips. Not a pleasant concept.
The governor’s office and the PUC could have taken a page out of the Hightower handbook or how to run a state agency. The PUC could be looking to the future and run the state energy for the benefit of people. The PUC could be providing some space and the state of Texas some money for fusion experiments.
Consider, oh readers of the PHIT substack, the Texas dominance in the wind power industry. It didn’t happen by chance.
Bob King worked with the Hightower TDA in the 80s. We here at PHIT call the Hightower TDA years as the Hightower Camelot. Hightower was surprised to find himself elected in 1982. When he took office in 1983, he sent out the word to forward looking folks to come to Texas and join the crusade to defend the weak and battle the evil giants.
Bob King answered that call. We interviewed him in 2020 as part of our Hightower Legacy project.
Back in the 70’s, King had started the Texas Solar Energy Society, which was composed of students, faculty, advocates, budding young solar companies, and entrepreneurs. King used his position in the TDA to foster the solar energy industry.
“We used TDA funds out of my natural resources budget to start the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association. That organization went on to have a major impact on renewables development in Texas and spun off the Wind Coalition and the Solar Industry. We helped support the concept of cogeneration and the energy positions put forward by the Gulf Coast CoGeneration Coalition. That whole movement became the Gulf Coast Power Association. It also led to the development of the Wholesale and Competitive Retail Electric Market in Texas.
We also helped support a group of farmers fighting for fair pricing of natural gas, because the Texas state regulatory structure only regulates natural gas at the city gate. Cities regulate gas providers through franchises. It was the wild west outside the city gate, so farmers had to organize to push back on the big pipelines and get price concessions.”
And Bob King, from inside the Texas Department of Agriculture, aided that fight.
This is what forward thinking agencies do. Plan for the future and plan for the people.
The Bob King interview was in 2020.
“At that time, everybody was positive about solar as a research thing. Where we ran into difficulty was when it started becoming a viable commercial alternative and competing for money, which is where we're still at today. Trump trying to make coal great again. In fact, he's got a “Coal First” grant that he just gave out, like American First. Yeah. So anyway, they haven't given up the buggy whips.”
Wind and Solar power provide a third of the energy for Texas. Texas is number 1 state in the country for solar energy. Wind and solar industries provide more employment than oil and gas and certainly more than nuclear power.
Why is that so? Because a forward looking agency paid attention to the needs of the people instead of the needs of the corporations. It is old timey Texas Populism.
Care to buy some used Buggy whips, anyone?