“The man who fears God will avoid all extremes,” Ecclesiastes 7:18
Speaking with Carol Massar and Matt Miller in a Bloomberg interview back in July 2010, former Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said, “(The United States) is a country whose economy has always been based on having plentiful, affordable supplies of energy. But one of the things we can do is develop more sources here at home – not only in terms of developing more oil here, but also we need to build more nuclear power plants. We need to install more renewable energy sources that are domestic sources, so that we are not as dependent on external imports.”
Generally, Americans don’t want nuclear power plants built nearby because of scenes like the Three Mile Island partial meltdown (USA, 1979); the Chernobyl complete meltdown (Russia, 1986); and various material leaks and structure damage that we’ve heard about. The good news, though, is we are getting better at operating and reinforcing nuclear reactors with each passing day; and the truth is, in spite of the real dangers, we need nuclear energy more than ever.
Carbon emissions – released by the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal – accumulate in the upper atmosphere, acting as a blanket. In the same way that blankets provide us overall warmth by holding in our body heat, so the ‘carbon (CO2) blanket' prevents the earth’s heat from escaping into space – trapping it inside the atmosphere causing a global warming effect. Thus, we are witnessing rapidly melting ice caps and glaciers, and rising record-setting temperatures.
China and the U.S., the two largest carbon emitters, consider significant reductions in greenhouse gases a threat to economic growth. We are, therefore, subject to suffer increasingly miserable environmental conditions and further irreparable damage until we as a global community decide to make positive changes.
The event that will likely prod governments into eco-friendly action is mass migration due to fresh-water shortages caused by the disappearance of glaciers; insufficient crop production resulting from erratic weather conditions; and disruptive, destructive & deadly storms. We are already witnessing this phenomenon to a limited extent in certain areas of the world, which include China, due to desertification; Pakistan, struck by massive flooding, and the Southeast region of the U.S. pounded by intensifying hurricanes. To mitigate mass migration, the logical choice would be to implement as many clean-energy technologies as possible in order to buy the time to wean ourselves off carbon-emitting forms of energy. Here is a list I arranged of the Top 10 Carbon-Emitting Countries along with their level of Nuclear-Energy Use as a Percentage of Overall Energy Output:
And a list of the Top 10 Nuclear-Energy Use Countries as a Percentage of Overall Energy Output:
As conventional energy sources become harder to come by and more expensive to extract, without incremental use of nuclear energy, it will eventually mean higher energy prices or, a worst, systematic blackouts. There is no free lunch. We can keep the ‘carbon party’ going by chucking more coal into the furnace and pouring more oil into the tank, but, as we are learning, this will result in hotter and hotter summers, leading to ever higher demand for energy output to power our air conditioners – at rising cost – spewing ever larger plumes of CO2 into earth’s atmosphere. Round and round the process goes.
Thus, our choice: A nuclear power plant in your area providing a sufficient supply of carbon-free energy toward an improved environment, or the peace of mind of having no threat of radiation exposure while we, and our carbon-emitting partners, continue to burn fossil fuels at a breakneck pace in an effort to quench our insatiable thirst for energy for a global population now approaching 7 billion, reaching 9 billion within the next 30 years – a path of certain ecological calamity.
As for me, as with investing, it is all about risk vs. reward. I prefer the low risk of radiation exposure for the probable reward of an improved environment to the disastrous ecological consequences now bearing down on us – threatening our children with bleak prospects in a world in which livelihoods are growing frustratingly complicated. As testimony to my belief, I comfortably reside within an hour’s drive of the Tokai Nuclear Power Plant here in Japan; I own a home near the McGuire Nuclear Reactors in Charlotte, NC; and I firmly support the building and upgrade of nuclear power plants across the U.S. And you?
Yes, we need to ensure that new and existing nuclear reactors take into account every possible safety measure; and yes, we need to direct appropriated tax dollars toward the technology that reprocesses fuel rods in a way that reduces their radioactive lifespan from 100,000 years to 500 years for safer storage, instead of simply lying spent rods on concrete slabs near the reactors ‘for future reprocessing’. But for every day we delay the installation of nuclear power plants – drop by drop of oil, and slack by slack of coal – we are creating what is fast becoming unbearable living conditions on a global scale.
