Every part of our lives involves electricity. The air conditioners that cool our houses, the phones we use hundreds of times a day, the batteries that start our cars; it’s all possible because of electricity. Only when a rough storm renders our homes powerless do we realize that we take having a constant supply of electricity for granted. The amount of power we are currently producing will be insufficient to supply our growing population and growing industries, “Most of the current forecasts indicate that the primary energy consumption in 2050 will at least double by comparison to the year 2000 (see OECD/IEA studies, for example)” (Bamberger 1), meaning we’ll need more power plants. But with greenhouse gases on the rise, and fossil fuel resources being limited, burning more coal and natural gas can’t solve this impending energy crisis. Nuclear Energy is the best source of energy to power our country, as it is cleaner and more efficient than coal or oil, and safer than most people think. With contributions from other clean energies such as wind and solar farms, nuclear energy can replace natural gas as the centerpiece of our cleanly powered country in the future.

Nuclear reactors are very effective at generating consistent and reliable power. These reactors can generate a tremendous amount of energy with a miniscule amount of fuel, “One uranium fuel pellet—about the size of the tip of a pencil eraser—produces the same energy as 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas, 1,780 pounds of coal or 149 gallons of oil.” (NEI). The NEI also states that the fuel costs for a nuclear plant is around 30% of its total operating costs, while 80% of total operating costs are spent on fuel for most other energy producing methods. Efficiency is a significant advantage of operating nuclear reactors, they can bring monthly power bills down for citizens once they get going. Another advantage is that all the uranium used in our nuclear reactors are mined in the united states- in Wyoming, South Dakota, New Mexico, and Nebraska (NRC). When it comes to nuclear reactors, we are completely independent in operation, possessing adequate amounts of the abundant metal uranium in our norther states. The same can’t be said for the oil and natural gas plants, which utilize fuel drilled in and imported largely from the Middle East.

So, how are nuclear plants “clean”? Nuclear is a clean energy in that its emissions of heat-trapping gasses, mainly CO2, are tiny in comparison to those of coal and natural gas. Coal, natural gas, and petroleum managed to release 99% of the U.S.’s 1.821 billion metric tons of CO2  released by electricity generation in 2016, while nuclear, geothermal, and other power sources released less than 1% of the remaining amount of CO2 (U.S. Energy Information Administration). So why are nuclear plants viewed in a generally negative way?

The first thing to come to mind to most people on nuclear reactors are the meltdowns that have occurred semi-recently like the Fukushima reactor in Japan, the Three-Mile Island accident, or the infamous Chernobyl meltdown, which has been immortalized by countless documentaries and movies. These catastrophes are very rare but cannot be down-played, “As the most serious accident in the history of the nuclear industry, the Chernobyl accident resulted in the exposure of an estimated 5 million people to radiation, and contaminated around 150,000 square kilometres of land across Europe” (Kerryn) ; the accident has affected millions of people and wildlife around the site and it is important to not forget the danger that comes when there aren’t adequate safety measures in place. But while there have been accidents in the past, the nuclear reactors of today put safety first. The AP1000 design which will debut first in china are significantly safer and simpler than its predecessor, the AP600. Additionally, there are more inherently-safe reactors under development, like the “molten-salt reactor” design being developed in China, which are to be fail-safe while being relatively compact. Richard Martin, a Technology-Reviewer from MIT remarked, “At least in theory, this type of reactor can’t suffer the kind of catastrophic failure that happened at Chernobyl and Fukushima, making unnecessary the expensive and redundant safety systems that have driven up the cost of conventional reactors” (Martin) while this technology isn’t operational yet, it could pave the road to a bright, safer nuclear future. 

The biggest downside to nuclear reactors is that the spent fuel rods require being cooled in a pool of water for 5 years, then “As the pools near capacity, utilities move some of the older spent fuel into "dry cask" storage” (NRC), which is where some controversy lies. These casks have to be stored somewhere indefinitely in “An independent spent fuel storage installation, or ISFSI, is a facility that is designed and constructed for the interim storage of spent nuclear fuel. These facilities are licensed separately from a nuclear power plant” (NRC) these casks are stored and monitored in places like Yucca mountain in Nevada. With the current 61 nuclear plants in the united states, about 2000 tons of spent nuclear waste is developed annually. Two-thousand tons may seem like a large amount of waste until it is compared to the 1.8 billion tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere by coal and natural gas plants annually. Managing the spent fuel rods is a small price to pay for releasing nearly no CO2 into the atmosphere. The pools where spent uranium fuel rods are cooled and the casks that the rods are later stored in are monitored and multiple safety measures have been prepared if a tank incurs damage, the pools have been built to withstand tornados and earthquakes, “Spent fuel pools lined with stainless steel are designed to protect against a substantial loss of the water that cools the fuel. Pipes typically enter the pool above the level of the stored fuel, so that the fuel would stay covered even if there were a problem with one of the pipes” (NRC) and the design of the rods themselves mitigates the ability for these rods to reach ‘criticality’, a condition where nuclear fission would become self-sustaining. The only uses thus found for the depleted uranium rods include: counterweights for aircraft, armor penetrating munitions, and armor for combat vehicles.

A TED talk was held where a nuclear energy advocate and a nuclear energy opponent argued over whether the world ‘needs’ nuclear energy in its future (“Debate: Does the world need nuclear energy?” Stewart Brand Mark Z. Jacobson). The two men were in agreement that the world needs a significant increase in the development and wide spread use of clean energy technologies to supply energy but to also combat greenhouse-gas emissions. The opponent’s main point was that nuclear energy is potentially dangerous and a combination of solar farms and wind farms would be a better solution to our energy needs, and a better answer to the global warming crisis. The counter was that the amount of area wind farms and solar farms would have to occupy to generate the same energy that the proposed amount of nuclear reactors could produce would be astronomical, taking up several states’ worth of area. It is true that our current clean energy options generate far less energy than we are currently generating from burning oil, but we must explore these technologies, as oil is limited and is harming our planet with its excessive CO2 emissions. While wind farms and solar farms are significantly less productive than nuclear reactors, they will be an important component of our world’s future “energy mix”. The power supply cannot be completely dependent on one method of energy production, but nuclear energy is ideal to be the backbone, the major component of the energy mix of the future. Nuclear and Hydro plants are the only clean energy sources that can reliably supply the ‘base load’, which is supplying power for a city at full throttle- constantly. Hydro is maxed out, producing 6% of the baseload electricity for the US, while Nuclear is currently producing 19.3% of the US’ baseload electricity, with much more potential.

Global warming has been a proven issue over the last few decades, so why are clean energies like wind, water, and solar so scarce? Do we not care about expanding alternative energy sources so long as oil and natural gas are cheap? And this leads us to the cost of weening our world off its oil addiction. According to Robert Lyman, there are 139 countries who have endorsed the “100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight (WWS) vision” (Lyman) and it doesn’t look like a realistic goal. As of 2014, Western Europe was at 22% of its capacity when it comes to renewable energy plants, and said plants only generated 3.8% of Europe’s energy that year, and wind and solar produced .3% of the world’s energy in total. When it is also considered that solar plants and photovoltaic plants are 4.6 times and 14.1 times as expensive as gas plants to operate respectively, and while also not generating power consistently (meaning there are many times when energy is wasted or sold at a loss), it is hard to get anyone behind these clean energies. This reinforces the point that we can’t rely solely on one or two types of clean technologies. Wind and solar are going to be a part of the future, and we’ll need to expand them to help reduce the need for gas plants. But they only produce energy during bright, windy days- when it gets dark and the winds settle, the gas plants pick up the difference. Nuclear plants are the only clean energy technology with the potential to replace gas plants as the backbone to supply a variable amount of energy on demand, at any time.

 I’m not proposing that there’d be a 30/30/30 split of demand on nuclear, solar, and wind- this configuration was analyzed by Mark Flanagan, from NEI Nuclear Notes, “To fuel one-third of the United States’ 2050 electricity demand with nuclear power would require only 440 sq-km [169 square miles]… If solar provided one-third of Americans’ electricity in 2050, it would require just 4,000-11,000 sq-km [1500-4250 square miles]… Powering one-third of the country's projected 2050 electricity demand with wind energy could take a land area spanning on the order of 66,000 sq-km… [25,480 square miles]” (Flanagan), meaning that wind energy simply can’t pull its weight alongside nuclear and maybe solar, at least not without occupying the area of the state of New York to do so. Nuclear plants are more power dense, they can generate the same power as a 45-75 square mile solar farm or a 200-square mile wind farm (in the right conditions), while only occupying 1.3 square miles of land. Land, like oil, is a limited resource, and using the most power dense source of energy can save land and preserve habitats. We cannot litter the coast line with wind farms, and we cannot dedicate entire fields to solar farms; solar panels have their place on rooftops, in urban environments where they don’t take up new space on the ground, and wind farms have their place in agricultural sites, where they can be used in moderation to not reduce the size of crop fields, while still generating useful electricity. To replace gas plants by 2050, which are currently generating around 87% of our nation’s power, we would need to fill 445.55 square miles with nuclear plants. While this is a large area, remember that it would take around 46 and 153 times as much area to develop the same power from solar or wind power, respectively. Additionally, the natural gas and coal plants that would no longer be needed could be erased or repurposed after ample power was available from the nuclear plants.

 Power isn’t cheap, and ‘clean’ power certainly isn’t cheap, so where’s the money going to come from to build all these new nuclear plants? The V.C. Summer’s 2 and 3 reactors have been recently cancelled due to design complications that led to being years behind schedule and billions over budget, so are we even capable of ramping up expansion of nuclear reactor projects? Reactors are expensive, as are large solar and wind farms, but it’s not a question of if we can build more reactors so much as if we can tack on the extra bill to the taxpayer’s power bill. As mentioned, our nation is going to need about 50% more power than what we had in 2000 by 2050, so not expanding our power generating capabilities isn’t an option. The quick and easy answer is to burn more natural gas and coal, its cheap and who cares if it’s warming the planet. The problem is that if we thought that way, if we didn’t care how our actions affected our descendants, then what are we working towards? At a household level, parents work hard and move cities or even countries to make a better life for their children, they base their decisions around what will be best for their children. We, as humans, want our future generations to be better off than we are; the Greatest Generation, for example, made sacrifices on huge levels to preserve their families and give their children a better world to live in. If we had to pay more taxes and increase power bills to help pay for new projects to develop clean technologies, it would be a small sacrifice to ensure our future generations didn’t have to struggle with impossible amounts of excess greenhouse gases. And if we chose not to develop clean energies right now, then we would enjoy cheap energy for years to come, we could build more natural gas plants to supply the increasingly power-hungry nation we live in- but, there will be a point where natural gas starts to run low, and we’ve already seen what small shortages can do to gas prices. If we don’t choose to develop clean energies whilst having access to a wealth of natural gas, we’ll be scrambling to find alternative power sources after it’s too late. We cannot wait until we have no oil and natural gas to depend upon, we need to expand alternative, and most importantly, clean energy sources while we can still use the air-polluting coal and natural gas plants as a crutch during construction. Maybe our children’s grandchildren will still have plenty of natural gas at their disposal, and maybe the buildup of CO2 won’t raise the earth’s temperature as fast as we’re projecting currently; but if we work towards switching to a clean, nuclear future now, our children’s grandchildren will be able to focus on solving other issues, thus making the world a better place for their children. 
