Imagine for a moment that you are sitting in a classroom. The teacher has lobbed a softball question and you keenly know the answer. In eagerness, you raise your hand with a zealous upward thrust. The teacher scans the classroom, pretending not to see you. Yet to be deterred, you start waving your hand, as blood drains from your raised extremity back towards your torso. The teacher still looks around, intentionally avoiding calling on you. However, with an unmatched passion, you proclaim Teacher, pick me, I know this one! only for the under-compensated government employee to pick the sleeping idiot sitting three rows behind you.
Now map this above scenario over the green energy conversation and you’ll quickly see that the eager student is nuclear power, and the teacher is society. We have asked for several decades the question of how to create a sustainable future. Nuclear power has provided us with an answer to said question, however we have decided not to roll it out en masse. Instead, we’ve decided to call upon solar, wind and even algae at some points.
Now to clarify, I am not against solar panels or wind farms. When used in their proper contexts, they are highly viable and effective means of generating power. Do you own a home in New Mexico, and the rocky, arid soil cannot sustain a vegetable garden or a lawn? Solar panels are perfect for that situation! Do you live 7000 feet above sea-level and need to walk with a forward lean to avoid being gusted away? A small windmill could be just what the doctor ordered!
However, every time solar and wind power are brought up as solutions, they are always met with the rallying cry of pundits (and we know how I feel about pundits at this point!) of Well, what about on cloudy days or days the wind doesn’t howl? Where’s your so-called sustainable energy then?? Ignoring battery technology for the sake of argument, I’ll provide an answer that has been tried-and-tested to be effective since the early days of the Cold War; nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power plants are capable of producing a constant supply of electricity to the grid, even during times when other green energy sources aren’t able to. This isn’t a speculative-pundit opinion either, there are numerous nuclear power plants in active service in the United States, and the rolling blackouts that solar/wind opponents fear are a complete non-issue. Nuclear power plants simply work and that’s part of the reason people never talk about them. And thanks to their ability to generate a round-the-clock energy supply to the grid, there is no need for private homeowners or small businesses to have to pay for extensive batteries to store power.
Nuclear power plants generate far less waste than a traditional coal-fired power plant. Better yet, nearly all of the waste generated by a modern nuclear plant can be safely stored on-site. Typically these are stored deep underground, below any seismically active plates in the Earth. This risk mitigation ensures that an earthquake will not result in the accidental release of radiation. Furthermore, there are lots of safety redundancies in modern plants to ensure another Chernobyl does not happen.
Speaking of Chernobyl, much of the reason the average American is hesitant to welcome nuclear power into their neighborhood is because of the historical bad press of foreign power plants. While some of these fears are justified, especially with Chernobyl, many of them are overblown or misinformed. Chernobyl’s meltdown was caused largely due to managerial negligence and political jockeying rather than any engineering failure or unexpected atomic activity. The nuclear industry, however, has also done a poor job of educating the public over the years. This lack of community outreach has in turn caused the average American to be slightly afraid of nuclear power. This is by far the largest obstacle that the nuclear industry needs to overcome in order for the United States to rapidly de-carbonize the electrical grid. However, this is not an unsolvable problem-far from it, actually.
As mentioned previously, we have figured out nuclear power several decades ago, so we have the science. Many of the decision points can be automated, thus taking human error out of the equation, we have the technology. While nuclear power plants can be expensive, however there is capital abound (and if the government is as committed to the Paris Climate Agreement as they claim to be, government funding for a state-run plant is an option too-you know, if government spending is your thing). Essentially, the only thing stopping us from building thousands of these sites starting tomorrow is social acceptance. We cannot let that be the barrier. The other option is to continue on our current path and completely ruin the planet for future generations. Let’s not doom our future humanity over the blight of bygone Soviets.
The United States can, and absolutely should, lead the world in adopting nuclear power plants for electricity. Not only should we pop them up wherever we can fit them here in the US, we should be exporting this technology and know-how to the European Union and Canada (some may ask Why stop there? but let’s keep it to countries that are pro-US for the sake of palatability). If the US, EU and Canada can de-carbonize their electrical grids, then that would be a massive step forward for mankind in terms of avoiding climate disaster. Japan has already taken great strides in adopting nuclear power, so ergo most of the developed pro-Western world would have de-carbonized electricity.
A de-carbonized electrical grid would make a lot of our current electric-only gadgets and infrastructure truly sustainable. There is no point in buying an electric car if the electricity used to charge it comes from a coal-fired power plant. Subway systems, public transit, and long-distance train networks that rely on an electric third-rails or wires aren’t yet truly sustainable. However, if we wholeheartedly embrace nuclear power, you can enjoy your Tesla guilt-free, as can the subway-rider, for both of you are now commuting in a truly sustainable manner.
So now we return to the classroom; nuclear is the eager student waving his hand, for he knows the answer to the softball question that we-the teacher-just lobbed out. The other students in the class-solar and wind-have already had a chance to participate in class. All we need to do as a society is just pick the student we know has the goddamn right answer.
Home Page 