It's time to move beyond oil and coal.

[DracIV]

This is long. Sorry I can't double space it or shorten it, but this is an important argument that affects the future of the world and could even use a lengthening. It's worth the read, so please do.



In this new century we face an uncertain future as pollution, global warming, and an energy crisis, all of which stem from the use of oil and coal fuels, threaten our stability. We need to completely replace oil and coal with hydrogen and nuclear power. Oil and coal are inefficient and harmful to the environment, public health, and the stability of the United States. Technology has advanced to the point where oil and coal are pointlessly harmful fuels for energy production, and situations all around would improve for Americans if we switched to nuclear and hydrogen fuels.


Using oil as a fuel has only harmed the U.S. over the past decades. The oil supply has never been safe or reliable, and violence has broken out in the Middle East dozens of times in the past decades, causing doubling and tripling in the price of oil. Not only that, but the price jump is always followed by a recession of the U.S. economy and thousands of jobs are lost. The Middle East has not become more stable, the supply of oil is still unreliable, and the danger is still potent. This foreign dependency weakens the U.S. daily by cutting away at our foundations. Oil is not worth the pain and money it costs.


Oil usage does major damage to several other things besides the economy. The use of the oil product gasoline in cars is the main polluter in the U.S. Each year that air pollution costs us $186 billion; money that would go back to you instead goes to cleaning up the pollution from oil (U.S. Dept. of Energy 1). But oil doesn’t just take money; it also takes your health. On better days, 20% of hospital respiratory cases are caused by gasoline air pollution. On worse days, every other respiratory case is caused by air pollution (U.S. Dept. of Energy 1). Oil has no advantages: it’s not cheap, it’s not safe, it’s not convenient, and it’s not clean. Oil does nothing but harm us.


Coal is a leech as well, but not as malignant as oil. For all the tons of coal we burn in power plants, only a third of the potential energy even converts into electricity. Each year every single coal power plant burns tens of thousands of tons of coal and an equal amount of waste gushes into the air. Although it is rarely mentioned, coal also contains substantial radioactive impurities of uranium and thorium. This means that coal plants release dozens of times more radiation into the environment than a nuclear power plant, not to mention thousands of tons of sulfur, carbon dioxide, and dozens of poisonous chemicals (Gabbard 1). Even worse, the radioactive waste from a coal plant can produce more energy than the burning of the coal itself provided, and without any of the deadly chemicals to boot. Coal plants cause massive acid rain storms, hazardous smog, and global warming, yet we still use them for 70% of our energy. The only advantage of coal is the convenience. Coal is easy to reach and doesn’t fluctuate in prices like oil, so it isn’t as harmful, but it still does us little good. Coal poisons our world, our society, and our bodies just as steadily as oil and does far more harm than convenience alone can justify.


Although oil and coal were the only options for decades past, we now have better alternatives. The most efficient and productive of the alternatives is nuclear power. The fuel requirements for nuclear plants are miniscule compared to the thousands of tons needed for coal plants. Nuclear power is thousands of times more efficient than coal power, even when you use 50-year-old plant designs, and we know how to make nuclear plants now that are 200 times more efficient than those older plants and produce a fraction of the waste. However, even if we didn’t have more efficient power plants there is enough nuclear fuel to last until the sun obliterates the earth in six billion years. This is vastly different from oil, which will run out within a century in the most optimistic estimates (Kirby 1).


Nuclear plants are environmentally safe. Rather than thousands of tons of waste per year, each nuclear plant produces just a single cubic meter of waste. The radiation of the waste is not a problem because we now know how and where we can store it safely and in complete isolation after President Bush’s announcement of the construction of a massive storage facility for nuclear waste in Nevada. Also, we never need to worry about that storage facility filling up because we can reprocess nuclear waste. 80% of the nuclear waste is recoverable through reprocessing, and the remaining waste has a fifth the volume and a half-life of only 30 years. Normal nuclear waste takes billions of years to become safe, but the remaining waste after reprocessing is completely safe and less radioactive than the original uranium in only 200 years (Kearfott 1). Although 200 years still seems long, the reprocessed waste will become safe faster than the storage facility fills up and we won’t have to run out of room. Now we can store all the future waste our nuclear plants could produce, and unlike coal and oil waste, the nuclear waste is completely contained. We don’t have massive amounts of poisonous materials clouding the air, and we don’t have piles of burnt rocks leeching poisons into the soil. We have a mere 10 cubic meters of waste each year from all the nuclear plants in the U.S. combined that is easily stored in a nice little concrete box hundreds of miles from the nearest human habitation where it won’t causes health problems or acid rain or deadly smog. Nuclear power can last us forever and energy will never again be a worry if we take the steps needed to implement it. However, nuclear energy use entails one minor risk.


The one risk, although miniscule, that has kept us from converting entirely to nuclear plants in the past years was the danger of a nuclear meltdown. However, the danger has been much exaggerated and nuclear power has now had half a century to prove itself. In fifty years of civilian nuclear usage and an accumulated 9,000 operation years, not to mention several decades more of military nuclear usage, only two accidents have occurred. The worse of the two, Chernobyl, occurred because the Russians designed the plant poorly, knew they designed it with dangerous flaws, filled it with improperly trained personnel, and then fiddled with it irresponsibly. The accident never could have hurt anyone in the first place if the Russians had not completely disregarded safety and decided not to put a concrete shell over any reactors of that design. When the nuclear plant exploded, 31 of the operators died. Chernobyl is considered a major catastrophe, although only 10 non-operators died from the radiation and only half of a square kilometer is dangerously radioactive (UIC 1). Despite major fears and exaggerations, the accident at Chernobyl did not cause any injury whatsoever to anyone outside the nearest vicinity of the plant (UIC 1).


The worse of the two accidents was caused by a misuse of nuclear power and should tell us that nuclear power must be used responsibly, not that it should not be used at all. The second accident in more than 9,000 operation-years of civilian nuclear power was the Three Mile Island incident. At Three Mile Island, the accident occurred not because nuclear power is dangerous; it happened because nuclear plants filled with neglected old machinery break down. The accident occurred when a series of too old parts broke and the operators didn’t catch on to what the big sirens meant. The problem could have easily been fixed early on, but the operators made several mistakes and failed to act properly until the plant was damaged. The plant eventually shut itself down, but the internal system was damaged and the plant knocked out of commission. No radiation escaped, no one was hurt, and the only damage was a broken plant (U.S. NRC 1). The Three Mile Island accident was more akin to the breakdown of an old car than a real accident.


A shutdown from neglect and a backfire from irresponsible use are the only two accidents in the history of nuclear usage, and both are easily preventable with modern technology and responsible use. We have stronger pipes, better heat exchange fluids, stronger shells, more reliable monitoring instruments, better machinery, more safeguards against accidents, and safer plant designs now. The chance of a meltdown now is nearly infinitesimal, and the long-feared danger of nuclear power is gone. That danger has been gone for a very long time, and only a series of misconceptions has kept us from converting further to nuclear power.


One of the main misconceptions is what exactly a true “nuclear catastrophe” consists of with nuclear power plants. Contrary to popular belief, a nuclear plant can never explode like a nuclear bomb. It is physically impossible for a nuclear plant to produce even a tenth as much destruction as a nuclear bomb or explode in a mushroom cloud. Terrorists can’t use fuel from a nuclear plant to make bombs because it is extremely hard and sometimes impossible to convert nuclear plant fuel into nuclear bomb fuel (the fear that made President Carter shutdown all new nuclear plant construction). It is much easier to build a plant specifically for making nuclear bombs than it is to steal uranium from a civilian plant and convert it into nuclear bombs in specialized facilities. But remember, “much easier” means “a little less impossible” in this sense, so we will never have to worry that a nuclear plant will become a nuclear bomb in the hands of terrorists. However, that doesn’t mean a nuclear plant can’t meltdown. In a meltdown, the core heats up hotter than the sun, but it merely melts the interior of the plant and melts into the ground. The concrete shell contains the meltdown itself and the core burns a path to the center of the planet and fizzles out harmlessly. The worst-case scenario is a ruined nuclear plant, radiation damage within square mile around the plant, and minor radiation sickness for everyone within a mile of the accident. That is the worst possible accident: a destroyed power plant and radiation damage in the near vicinity of the power plant. A nuclear meltdown won’t even cause a nuclear winter, or radiation sickness beyond the very near vicinity. Nuclear power plants are not a danger, meltdowns are a miniscule risk, and the benefits far outweigh the downside. Is it worse to take a risk and leap into the future, even though we may trip, or stand in the past as our coal and oil corrupt our bones, burn our lungs, and cut out our hearts and souls?


Nuclear power is not the entire solution. Nuclear plants are efficient, clean, and safe, but they are big. Nuclear power plants don’t fit inside cars, but hydrogen does. The best way to lower oil usage is to replace it with a clean fuel like hydrogen. Hydrogen is completely clean; it produces no dangerous waste whatsoever. Hydrogen is versatile and efficient and no longer expensive to create. Recent research has discovered that hydrogen is much easier and cheaper to produce at temperatures above 1000° (INEEL 1). Conveniently, the best place to find both the high temperature and electrical source required to make hydrogen is a nuclear power plant. In fact, each “Generation IV” nuclear plant can produce the equivalent of 200,000 gallons of gasoline per day (Cascio 1), making hydrogen a viable alternative to gasoline. Hydrogen is now a cheap, perfectly clean choice for cars. What better solution to car pollution than cars that don’t pollute at all? Hydrogen is three times as efficient as oil and comes in an unlimited supply as long as we have power plants to make it. However, hydrogen does have one downside. The technology is so recent for hydrogen cars that hydrogen storage is not compact enough. It will be an estimated three to eight years before hydrogen cars will be good enough to push oil cars out of the market, which is a very short time when you consider the decades it took to reach this efficiency with oil cars. Hydrogen cars currently cost more than oil cars, but within a decade they will be the cheaper and overwhelmingly better choice.


If we truly want to convert entirely to nuclear power, we have that time to spare. Remember that constructing enough nuclear plants for all our energy needs would probably take at least a decade, and by time we complete enough nuclear plants, oil will already be on it’s way out and hydrogen will be ready to partner up with nuclear power. Oil and coal are useless. That future world of near zero pollution and clean cities with unlimited power and a lush environment thriving under the care of humanity can be ours. We can’t wait for things to work themselves out and for this future to happen centuries away, we can grasp it now and achieve a utopian dream we’ve been salivating over for decades; we can solve the problems of the world now, not later.


We finally have the chance to begin fixing the world, to make it the dream we always wanted, and yet we hold back, we shy from the future when so much good lies ahead. This is how we can move forward, how we can finally put things to right. In a short few years we can see the energy crisis abolished; pollution and deadly rains removed; mountains and lakes and forests restored; the country strengthened. The technology to start this is here today, and the technology to finish this will be here tomorrow. This is our world and our country, and this is how both can thrive and prosper. All it requires is a step, and people willing to take it. Comments?




Works Cited

Kearfott, Kim. “It’s Time to Recycle Spent Nuclear Fuel.” The Detroit News. 12 Nov 2001 <http://detnews.com/2001/editorial/0111/12/a09-341229.htm> (10 Nov 2004)

Gabbard, Alex. Coal Combustion: Nuclear Resource or Danger. <http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html> (10 Nov 2004)

U.S. Department of Energy. “Economic Growth” U.S. Dept. of Energy: Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. 21 June 2004 <http://www.eere.energy.gov/biomass/economic_growth.html> (10 Nov 2004)

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Fact Sheet on the Accident at Three Mile Island. 1 March 2001 < http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html> (8 Dec 2004)

Uranium Information Centre Ltd. Chernobyl Accident. August 2004 <http://www.uic.com.au/nip22.htm> (8 Dec 2004)

Kirby, Alex. “When the Last Oil Well Runs Dry” BBC News. 19 April 2004. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3623549.stm> (8 Dec 2004)

INEEL. Idaho lab, Utah company achieve major milestone in hydrogen research. 29 Nov 2004. < http://newsdesk.inel.gov/press_releases/2004/11-29hydrogen_production.htm> (9 Dec 2004)

Cascio, Jamais. Nuclear Hydrogen? 30 Nov 2004 <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001660.html> (10 Dec 2004)

Extra Reference: Information on President Bush’s announcement about the nuclear storage if you care (common knowledge) <http://www.ne.doe.gov/home/01-10-02.html>