this stage of the experiment she would have to search for funding. It was her least favorite part of real science. God, how she hated asking — begging — for money.
They stood on the work deck on the fantail of the 264-foot research ship that Eve’s department at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamic Laboratory had borrowed from NOAA’s Marine and Aviations Operations. At 2,328 tons the ship had been originally built as a T-AGOS spy ship for the CIA, but that work was better done these days by satellite. Most of the sophisticated electronic instruments had been left aboard and the stubby ship bristled with antennas, radar, and GPS domes. Tomorrow morning she and the thirteen techs and scientists would be dropped off in Miami and the crew would take the ship back to her homeport of Pascagoula, Mississippi.
She’d been at it with the Fox News crew for the better part of an hour, and she was ready to get back to work, finalizing the week’s data set, and getting the generator back aboard.
“Okay, Dr. Larsen, I’d love for you to sum up what you’re doing out here,” Szucs asked. “What you hope to accomplish and where it goes next? Maybe something of the long-term implications you told us about.”
“By 2050 the world’s energy needs are going to be double what they are today,” she began. “But the fact is we’ll run out of relatively clean fossil fuels to generate the electricity that we need long before that. There’s only a finite supply. We have enough coal to last well into the next century, but if we went that route the air would become unbreathable. The entire planet would turn into Beijing on a bad day.”
She pointed toward the coast. “Twenty-five miles away is the Hutchinson Island nuclear generating plant. In the next year permits will be given for at least thirty-four more facilities like that here in the U.S. and maybe several dozen more worldwide. That helps, but what are we supposed to do with the radioactive waste — thousands, eventually millions, of tons of the stuff?”
She shrugged and managed a slight smile. “And yet we need to go all electric. Electric cars, ships, and airplanes, electrically heated homes, electrically operated factories. If coal is out and nukes are too dangerous we’ll have to look someplace else.”
She was lecturing, but in the end she supposed it wouldn’t matter. They’d either listen or they would trivialize her like her ex had, which in the end was why he’d become her ex. “Of course wind farms are helping, and so are solar cells, but those technologies have a long way to go before they become commercially viable — and they’re not without their problems.”
“How about T. Boone Pickens’s suggestion that we switch to natural gas?” Szucs asked.
“It’s marginally okay as an interim measure, but burning gas still produces carbon dioxide. We’re in the middle of the Gulf Stream, which is a thirty-mile-wide ocean current that runs all the way up the U.S. coast and across the Atlantic to the UK as the Atlantic Drift. It’s warm water, so there are palm trees in southwestern England, which is at the same latitude as Newfoundland. It never slows down — thirty million cubic meters per second in the Florida Straits and eighty million cubic meters per second by the time it passes Cape Hatteras.”
“That’s a lot of water.”
“And that’s a lot of energy,” Eve said. “One-point-four petawatts — one-point-four followed by fourteen zeroes — of equivalent heat energy. More than one hundred times the energy demand of the entire world.
“If we can harness just a tiny fraction of that power, along with energy from the Humboldt Current along the west coasts of South America and North America and the Agulhas Current around Africa, our energy problems would be at an end. We’d have cheap, clean, renewable energy. All the electricity we’d need for centuries, maybe millennia.”
“But the energy from the Gulf Stream has to be brought ashore,” Szucs said.
She hesitated for just a moment, the toughest part yet to come. The part that she had been sharply criticized for not only by her fellow scientists, and especially environmentalists, but by senators and congressmen from states where coal or uranium provided the economic backbone, and of course by big oil.
“We’ve placed a small water generator fifty feet beneath us,” Eve said. “A Pax Scientific impeller shaped almost like the agitator in a top-loading washing machine, or an auger, three feet in diameter. The Gulf Stream turns the impeller, which is connected to a shaft that runs an electrical generator. In our experiment the electrical current is brought aboard where it’s used to run all of our electronics, air-conditioning, and even the bow and stern thrusters that keep us in place.
“When we get funding we’ll place much larger impellers in the Stream with blades twenty-five feet in diameter, and run the electrical current generated ashore where it can be plugged directly into the already existing power grid — the high voltage lines you see leading away from power plants like Hutchinson Island. When the first few are up and running, Hutchinson Island can be shut down and dismantled.”
“How many impellers?”
“Eventually thousands, maybe tens of thousands around the world,” Eve said. “It’d be the biggest project ever undertaken in the history of the world. Thirty, maybe forty, trillions of dollars over a fifty-year period.”
Szucs whistled in spite of himself. “What you’re talking about could bankrupt us all.”
“We can’t afford not to do it,” Eve said. “But there’s more, something we haven’t covered yet.” The something her boss Bob Krantz, NOAA’s chief of special projects, had expressly forbidden her to bring up.
“Make so much as a hint, and your career will be over,” he’d told her more than two years ago ago. He was a large man who’d played football for Notre Dame and had not gotten too badly out of shape yet. When he wanted he could be physically intimidating.
They were in his book-lined Silver Spring, Maryland, office and although Eve had been standing while he was sitting behind his desk, she’d felt as if he were towering over her. She remembered her anger at that moment. Blind, frustrating. He had her paper in front of him, and she knew that he’d read it. The science was sound, and her results good, yet he was dismissing her.
“It’s my career, Bob,” she’d shot back.
“Not with NOAA if you persist.”
“Are you threatening to fire me?”
“You won’t have a lab and you won’t have the funding to be on the water,” he said, sidestepping the question, which was his style. He’d been a fair scientist who, in Eve’s estimation, had risen to his level of incompetence.
“Then I’ll get my own funding.”
Krantz nodded sadly. “You’re a brilliant scientist, Eve. Too brilliant to go off half-cocked. Power generation is an attainable goal, but not on the scale you want to achieve.”
“We’re not talking about that!” Eve had shouted, but immediately got control of herself.
“Let me finish,” Krantz said. “Even Sunshine State Power and Light agrees that your water generators might be able to supply thirty-five percent of Florida’s needs. Which is a good thing.”
“One hundred percent,” Eve said. “But that’s still not the issue.”
“No,” Krantz said. He handed Eve’s paper back to her. “Send this to
Eve focused again on Szucs. “We can control the planet’s climate.” It was the same thing she’d told Krantz that day.
“If you generate enough power so that coal- and oil-fired electrical plants can be shut down, it should have some effect on global warming.”
“No, I mean
Szucs looked at her as if she were an alien from outer space who’d just landed.
She would be sending her research to
“The Gulf Stream is a closed system,” she told the camera. “The sun powers it, and the Stream distributes the energy around the Atlantic Basin. Take enough energy out of the system and redistribute it as electricity and the transfer, if it’s big enough, will have an effect on weather in this hemisphere. Take enough energy out of the Humboldt Current along the east side of the Pacific, and weather will be modified there. Balance the two, along with Africa’s Agulhas Current, and others in the Arctic and Antarctic and we’ll stop or diminish hurricanes and typhoons, whose main purpose anyway is the distribution of energy.”
Don barged out of the electronics bay forward and two decks up and raced to the aft rail that looked down on the winch deck. “Eve!” he shouted.
