At the height of the cold war national governments were involved in a MAD policy of Mutual Assured Destruction. For the United States this reduced to a tripod defense of submarines, aircraft, and land based ICBMs, any one of which could independently discharge a sufficient number of atomic bombs to destroy the enemy.
A world war of a different nature looms on the horizon. If it can be incontrovertibly proven to the satisfaction of all concerned that global climate change is a pending human created problem with catastrophic consequences then, in order to save the planet, a global Manhattan-like project will be required. In order to wage this war it is possible for national governments to implement a united MASS policy of Mutual Assured Survival Systems in a tripod defense of nuclear power, equatorial power, and ocean power, any leg of which can complement other regenerative options to provide all the world's energy needs for all time in a cost effective and environmentally benign manner.
Wolf Hafele pointed out in a September 1990 Scientific American article "Energy from Nuclear Power" that the atom contains one trillion times the energy density of the regenerative sources of the sun and wind and one million times that of the fossil sources of coal, oil, and natural gas. Thus, nuclear power occupies a commanding position for immediate development. It might, however, be many decades before fusion is available on a cost effective basis but fission nuclear power is poised to be a dominate energy source in the near term. This is consistent with the views expressed by James Lovelock (proposer of the Gaia hypothesis), Patrick Moore (Greenpeace apostate), and Stewart Brand (author of Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto). All three have implied that nuclear power will be necessary for us to escape from the present environmental crisis in which we find ourselves.
Perhaps the most efficient way to begin is to volume produce floating nuclear power plants in shipyards for operation from a Pneumatically Stabilized Platform (PSP) abutting land. If so dictated by NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) requirements, these PSPs can be moved "over the horizon" and the generated electricity transmitted to shore via underwater power cables. In this operational method nuclear power plants up to 100 feet high can be "made invisible" to residences on shore simply by anchoring this manmade PSP island beyond 12 miles in international waters. Oversight would be provided by a combination of the International Atomic Energy Agency and national agencies in the host nation, such as the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Westinghouse, Atomic Energy of Canada, and Babcock & Wilcox have already designed floating nuclear power plants and other nuclear vendors can easily do the same. Thus, at a given location, that nuclear vendor would be used that is most acceptable to the utility or the country using this mode of power production.
The nuclear plants would serve as peak suppliers of electricity with off-peak power used to join hydrogen and carbon dioxide to form methanol as described in Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy by Olah, Goeppert, and Prakash. This methanol can substitute for coal, oil, and natural gas in all power demands, including transportation.
These nuclear islands can surround Europe, North America, South America, Africa, India, Island nations in the Pacific (including Australia, Taiwan, and Japan), the Korean Peninsula, and China's ocean front, for examples, so as to provide 80% of the world's power needs. The other 20% could come from solar, hydro, wind generators, geothermal, land based nuclear, etc.
For interim disposal of spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive wastes, four manmade PSP islands can be located in international waters in the Atlantic Ocean, Eastern Pacific Ocean, Western Pacific Ocean, and Indian Ocean with final disposition to be determined through decisions rendered on this subject by future international committees.
For the second leg of the tripod, PSP equatorial islands can be outfitted with OTEC (ocean thermal energy conversion) plants that can transmit energy to shore through methanol tankers. These islands can be further outfitted with a rectenna to collect power transmitted from solar satellites in geostationary orbit.
For the third leg, manmade islands can be designed to operate in the Southern Latitudes sailors refer to as the Roaring Forties, outfitted with an energy source such as a wind-wave converter (US Patent 5549445 - Macro-engineering process and system for all-weather at-sea wind-energy extraction), and the generated electricity used to produce hydrogen which would be combined with carbon dioxide to form methanol, transmitted to shore via tankers.
The Maine based Dirigo (deer-uh-go, meaning "I Lead") Energy Institute was incorporated as a nonprofit organization with a mission to investigate this proposed MAD to MASS transformation in more depth and detail.
