Humanity officially took a step into a new era in 1945 when the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on the Japanese home islands.
Whatever you think of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is no doubt that they catapulted us all into a new age. Ever since the Second World War, the most powerful weapons platforms and greatest sources of nature-independent energy have been delivered to us through atomic physics. That is why I think, as the United States seeks to go carbon neutral by 2050, investment in nuclear power will be invaluable, and we already have a ready-made template in European ally and fellow NATO member, France.
Following the fuel shocks of the early 1970s, France invested in a fleet of dozens of nuclear power plants. At its height, nuclear accounted for 75% of France’s electricity, followed by natural gas. France’s electricity was so abundant that it exported it to other European nations. However, France has soured on nuclear as of late. Following the 2011 disaster at Fukushima, safety concerns have led the French government to set targets to cut nuclear dependence to 50% and invest more in natural gas and renewables.
There are many factors that recommend wind and solar, but for my money, advanced economies would do better with a heavy investment in nuclear. For one, whatever the future of energy generation on Earth is, systems of spacecraft propulsion in the future will almost certainly require a cheap, fuel-efficient propellant like nuclear fusion mass. Another factor is reliability or as they say in the business “capacity factor.” A fuel source’s capacity factor is what percentage of the time a facility is actually generating electricity as opposed to sitting idle or powering down for maintenance and/or refueling. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, nuclear power has a capacity factor of 93.5% as opposed to renewables like solar and wind which sit at 24.5% and 34.8% respectively. That could make a big difference in preventing brownouts and blackouts, especially if electric vehicles really do come in vogue, in which case the capacity of the electric grid will be placed under real strain.
The safety factor of nuclear power has always been the main sticking point, especially with environmental groups that militate against it. Everyone remembers the devastating meltdown at Chernobyl, Ukraine SSR in 1986, which still has a 1,004 square-mile “exclusion zone” around it to this day. More recently, the Fukushima-Daiichi meltdown, which resulted from an earthquake and subsequent tsunami is the global go-to for nuclear power gone wrong. However, the Japanese Diet found that only one death could be directly attributed to the disaster, and while the environmental toll and the effect on the surrounding communities were massive, fewer people died in 2011 from nuclear accidents than died in wind-turbine-related accidents.
Wind and solar are also not as environmentally friendly as they seem. Wind turbines kill hundreds of thousands of birds per year, and not just small, numerous species like robins, starlings or sparrows but large and endangered species like eagles and condors. The manufacture of solar panels requires use of heavy metals and hazardous materials, meaning that solar panels can be classified as hazardous waste, depending (of course) on the specific model being used. Both forms of energy have problems regarding land use, with solar and wind being particularly inefficient when considered from a land use perspective. There is a final set of reasons why we might want to limit especially wind power growth, namely aesthetic ones. Wind turbines, at the cost of making me sound like an old curmudgeon, are an eyesore and generate a lot of noise.
To generate the required energy from wind to make up for reductions in both fossil fuels and nuclear, wind farms would end up cropping up all over formerly pristine hillsides. As someone who believes in conservation, we should strive to limit our footprint as much as possible. That is why I would favor an expansion of nuclear.
Mostly overlooked, hydroelectric is a great source of renewable, clean energy. Growing up in Southwest Tennessee, it was kind of cool knowing that the majority of my power came from renewable resources, that being Pickwick Dam. All that said, we can’t simply go around damming up every river. Hydroelectric is great, but it’s also limited in where it can be used and even it is not without environmental impact. If it was, we wouldn’t need salmon cannons.
Any time humans live anywhere, they make a (usually negative) impact on the environment. Nuclear is just the same. There is nuclear waste sitting under Yucca Mountain that will be radioactive for, by some estimates, a million years. Nuclear disasters have the potential not just to claim lives but also to horribly contaminate the water table and devastate ecosystems. But so do fossil fuels, and for a power generation method as fuel-efficient, relatively safe, and around-the-clock reliable as nuclear, that seems an acceptable cost-benefit analysis.
Photo Credit / Azom.com
