In 1976, Amory Lovins, the 26-year-old British representative of Friends of the Earth, published Soft Energy Paths, a phenomenally successful book that calledfor an American economy run on renewable and “soft” energy.

Lovins’ mentor was E.F. Schumacher, who three years earlier had written Small is Beautiful, a manifesto for “appropriate technology.”  Applying this logic to energy, Lovins argued that central power plants were entirely inappropriate. They generated electricity far from your home, then shipped it long distances, wasting two-third of the energy in the process. Nuclear power, which split the atom to perform what were essentially household chores, was the most inappropriate of all.  “It’s like cutting butter with a chainsaw,” Lovins wrote famously.

Far more appropriate were household windmills and solar collectors, small, harmless devises that were simple enough so nothing much could go wrong: 

"The reason electrical grids are designed to such exemplary – and expensive – standards of reliability is that they must be, because so many people depend on them that a failure could be a social catastrophe. If your solar system fails (which, of course, it should not do, as there should not be much to go wrong with it), you can put on a sweater or go next door."

Now flash forward thirty years. T. Boone Pickens is proposing to cover 1,200 square miles of Midwest farmland with windmills. These 60-story structures are so gargantuan that one of their biggest problems is finding roads capable of trucking them to the site. Huge cranes have to be erected and there is talk of on-site manufacture. Internal elevators are being installed for continuing maintenance. On the East and West Coasts, giant windmills are being set atop mountain ridges, ruining landscapes.   

Last week Nobel Prize Winner Al Gore envisioned a new “green” America by proposing a new $400 billion electrical grid to transport windmill and solar electricityfrom remote farmland and desert to the cities where it is needed. All we need to do is erect windmills on an area the size of West Virginia (24,000 square miles) to get all our electricity, Gore said. Amory Lovins is no less ambitious. He wants to cover all of North and South Dakota (147,000 square miles). 

So why is it that a movement that once promised “technology on a human scale” is now threatening cover the entire American landscape with industrial geegaws? Whatever happened to “small is beautiful?”

What the proponents of “renewable” energy never took account of is a factor called “energy density.” This refers to the amount of energy we can expect to extract from a given mass or volume of a natural resource.

Sunshine is free and ubiquitous but it is extremely dilute. The sunshine falling on a square-meter card table is enough to power a single 100-watt light bulb. To match the output of a standard 1000-megawatt coal or nuclear plant would require 50 square miles. Wind and hydroelectricity have even greater land requirements. A wind farm generating the same 1000 MW will require 125 square miles of land. A 1000-MW hydroelectric dam backs up a reservoir 250 miles square.

Burning fossil fuels, on the other hand, takes advantage of Albert Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2. The formula says that when matter is transformed into energy, it must be multiplied by the speed of light squared – a factor of about one quadrillion. This means a very, very small amount of mass turns into a very, very large amount of energy. When we burn a gallon of gasoline, one-billionth of its mass becomes pure energy. Yet this is enough to push a 2000-lb automobile 30 miles – a remarkable accomplishment when you think about it.

Even the energy available from fossil fuels, however, pales in comparison to the energy that can be drawn from the nucleus of the atom. Chemical reactions involve electrons, which make up only 1/1800th of the atom’s weight. The other 1799/1800ths is in the nucleus. This makes “nuclear reactions” exceed chemical reactions by a factor of 2 million. A uranium fuel pellet the size of a tootsie roll contains the same energy as half a ton of gasoline.

In testifying before Congress a year ago, Al Gore claimed that nuclear power could not help much in dealing with global warming because “reactors come in only onesize – extra large.”  Yet last week Hyperion, a California company, introduced a reactor about the size of a gazebo that can generate 27 MW, enough to power 20,000 homes. Such reactors tucked in a basement could power whole towns without requiring new transmission lines or ruining landscapes. 

It may be that miniature nuclear reactors will eventually be the ones to prove that small is beautiful.