All Your Green Blog

So you may have noticed fossil fuels are the way of the past. Our burning of fossil fuels is causing the planet to slowly become unlivable. Plus they're flat running out. So we cannot keep using them forever even if we pay no head to Global Warming and pollution in general.

So what do we replace fossil fuels with? Clean, safe, nuclear energy of course. Solar and Wind are great but they just are not cost effective yet. Nuclear power plants can produce a boatload of power and they are certainly better than the coal fired plants we use now. (Coal plants produce more energy in the US that any other power plant type.)

So lets talk boatloads. Nuclear power stations can put out something like a gigawatts of power. That translates roughly into 8-9 terrawatt-hours of electricity per year. If I'm sounding like Doc Brown from Back to the Future then thats the point. The average household in America uses something like one megawatt-hour so 1 nuclear power plant can power about a million homes. I don't know where jigga-watt falls on this scale but I know a million homes is a lot!

But its radioactive that's bad. Sure radioactive substances are dangerous. But if you think that coal is safe your in for a shock. A coal power station that produces the same amount of electricity as a nuclear power station, releases 100 times more radiation. OMFSM! How does that happen? you ask. Well coal contains uranium in small quantities. When we burn it, not only are we releasing horrible CO2 rich pollution, but in fact horrible radioactive CO2 rich pollution.

What about the radioactive waste how do we deal with it? Well lets see, most radioactive waste is spent fuel. Where did we get the "fuel" to begin with? Well we mined it out of the earth's crust. So why not put it back when we're done with it. Its certainly not more radioactive than when we dug it up. That would violate conservation of energy. I'm not proposing that we try to put it back exactly where we found it. I'm just saying that the current plan of bury it under some mountain isn't really that bad of an idea.

Like it or not Nuclear is a much better energy source than any fossil fuel. Its not perfect, not sustainable, but it is the direction we should be moving in. If we start switching over from coal to nuclear we will be reducing pollution while still producing the power we need. So until solar power plants start producing terrawatt-hours of electricity I say what's wrong with a little radiation. Living near a nuclear reactor is not as bad a getting an x-ray and its much better than living near a coal power plant.