Is Nuclear Energy The Answer To Fossil Fuels?

Nuclear energy is held up as the obvious successor to fossil fuels as a solution for producing base load mainstream electricity

. But is nuclear a viable long term solution or just another quick fix?

Undoubtedly fossil fuels have serious issues associated with them. Peak Oil production is one such problem which will very soon make its presence felt at both the national and individual level. Another even more serious concern is the possibility of serious and perhaps irreversible climate change brought about by pollution primarily in the form of Carbon Dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

So given these issues how does Nuclear energy hold up as a long term solution to energy production? Nuclear has a bad name due to unfortunate incidents including Three Mile Island and Chernobyl where reactor problems caused major long term human and environmental suffering. Despite this, casualties associated with electricity production in the Nuclear industry are far fewer per unit of energy than in the coal and oil industries.

When nuclear power stations were first developed there was the issue of waster storage. The liquid waste had, and still does have the potential to leak into water tables and cause severe contamination. This problem has largely been overcome as Nuclear waste can now be stored in solid form.

Fuel enrichment is a fact of using Nuclear energy, as the whole process would be far too wasteful without it. It is unfortunate that weapon-grade Plutonium-239 is a byproduct of this process. Nuclear weapons, while devastating as shown by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War 2, are essentially a separate issue and the fact that they are still produced is more of a sad reflection on global politics than a condemnation of Nuclear energy.

The reality for us though is that nuclear power relies upon supplies of Uranium and Plutonium that are themselves limited. While these resources may have only begun to be exploited, it is certain that if our current level of increase of energy consumption continues then Nuclear fuel will also face the prospect of its own peak production level.

Surely it is not responsible to replace fossil fuels with another energy source that is just as doomed to fail in the future. Supporters of Nuclear power say it is the solution we need to reduce emissions immediately, and while it would do this we need to be looking further into the future.

We need to be making plans not just for our own well-being, but also that of our children and grandchildren. Adopting wide scale renewable energy production from solar and wind sources is the way forward. These are proven technologies that are more than capable of meeting our energy needs and which have very limited adverse environmental effects, if they are manufactured and deployed sensibly.

Governments need to cease making excuses about why renewable energy can't be used and start implementing massive scale clean energy power stations to replace all other sources for base load electricity production.

by: Roger Vanderlely.

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