Power & Energy | |
Power & Energy | |
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While it seems to fly in the face of everything we believe and have been taught
about nuclear power, it may actually be the safest form of power production
that we have. Ironically, the immense potency of the power of splitting an atom
is simultaneously what makes nuclear weapons so dangerous as well as what makes
nuclear power so safe.
Despite high-profile nuclear disasters like Chernobyl in Ukraine (then the
Soviet Union), Fukushima in Japan, and Three Mile Island in the United States,
the deaths related to nuclear meltdowns are actually very few. In fact, climate
scientists Pushker Kharecha and James Hanson discovered that overall, nuclear
energy actually saves lives--their
study found that up until now, nuclear power has already saved
nearly two million lives that would have been lost to air pollution-related
deaths from the contamination that would have been produced by other, more
traditional, sources of energy.
Nuclear power is an incredibly clean form of energy thanks to its staggering
efficiency. The uranium used to produce nuclear power has the ability to create
a whopping one million times more heat than equal masses of fossil fuels or
even gunpowder. Nuclear power has the valuable ability to create massive
amounts of heat without creating fire, and therefore it produces no smoke. This
means that it's a much, much cleaner alternative as compared to fossil fuels,
which cause seven million premature deaths per year (according to data
provided by the World Health Organization) thanks to the massive amount of
smoke produced by the industry.
While renewable resources like wind and solar are also much, much cleaner
alternatives to the fossil fuel industry, with negligible levels of emissions,
nuclear has a lot of benefits that renewables can't compete with. One of these
is that although nuclear plants create massive amounts of energy, they take up
very little space thanks to their energy density. Even in places where the sun
shines the majority of the time, like in California, a solar farm takes up 450 times more space than a nuclear plant to produce
the same amount of energy.
On top of taking up far less space than renewable energy production, nuclear
also requires a much, much smaller quantity of materials and therefore produces
considerably less waste. Put simply, nuclear is far more efficient and
energy-dense than either solar or wind. In fact, according to a fact sheet published by the Nuclear Energy Institute,
the entire nuclear industry in the United States, one of the biggest
energy-consuming cultures per capita in the world, produces just 2,000 metric
tons of used nuclear fuel rods each year, or just a single soda can's worth of
waste per person served by nuclear energy per year.
Michael Shellenberger, president of independent research and policy
organization Environmental Progress and a Time Magazine "Hero of the
Environment," sums the matter up simply: "the energy density of
the fuel determines its environmental and health impacts." In his think
piece titled "Why Renewables Can't Save the Planet" Shellenberger
goes on to say, "It's true that you can stand next to a solar panel
without much harm while if you stand next to a nuclear reactor at full power
you'll die. But when it comes to generating power for billions of people, it
turns out that producing solar and wind collectors, and spreading them over
large areas, has vastly worse impacts on humans and wildlife alike."
Despite the strong case for nuclear, however, it remains a hard sell in the
United States thanks to a poor public image and overblown safety concerns as
well as an adverse political climate. Even those politicians who are pushing
for green energy reform are simultaneously pulling away from nuclear. With all of the solid
evidence in its favor and an ever-increasing need to clean up our energy act,
what more will it take for nuclear to become part of the United States' energy
future?
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