Went out last night to see a movie and we parked behind this car with a bumper sticker reading something like “Stop Eskom’s new nuclear power plant.”
That’s when I realised that the one thing in politics that I find most annoying is people that are fundamentally against nuclear power in any way without coming up with any examples of better alternatives.
To me saying “no nuclear power” means “more coal-fired power plants”. How much do nuclear power plants contribute to air pollution and global warming? Nothing, whereas the main alternative (coal power plants) is arguably the biggest contributor out there. Which one would I rather live next to? A modern nuclear power plant. Why? Coal power plants constantly create greenhouse gasses, whereas the chances of a nuclear power plant experiencing a meltdown in this day and age are extremely slim. Newer designs for nuclear power plants are much safer than Chernobyl’s reactor and anyone who did the smallest amount of reading up on pebblebed nuclear reactors would know that they cannot possibly melt down. They are designed and will be built that way. The laws of physics cause them to scale down and stop if things go wrong.
Wind and solar power aren’t always alternatives. I want them to be, but they are not a silver bullet. The sun doesn’t always shine and wind speed isn’t constant. Unlike traditional power plants, we can’t scale up wind or solar power during peak times when we suddenly need electricity. The biggest challenge is storing energy during off-peak times so that we can use it during peak times when we need more power than we’re generating. As far as I know the best way to do that is with some hydroelectric scheme, but we all know how damaging that can be for the environment. There are probably other ideas, but as far as I can tell no one’s come up with a cost-effective, reliable way of storing very large amounts of energy in a safe, environmentally friendly manner.
Then there’s the problem that in general no one wants a big wind-power farm built anywhere near them, we need very many wind turbines taking up lots of space and you can’t just put them anywhere, because the “wind quality” is just not the same everywhere all the time. People are afraid that wind turbines will somehow chop up birds (as if these things turn at the speed of a cooling fan) and that they make some dreadful noise as they turn. (This might have been true in the past, but is apparently also solved)
Furthermore, to satisfy all our energy requirements using solar panels will require a hell of a large amount of very expensive solar panels made using (as far as I’ve heard) very toxic chemicals.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not opposed to wind or solar power. In fact, I wish we had more of it, but we’ll need a lot of infrastructure for that to generate all the electricity we require. In the meantime I think we can at least try and supplement our electricity output with clean power and then have some nuclear power plants that we can turn up when we need them.
Coal-fired power plants are the enemy. That’s what we should phase out. In the near term I think we need nuclear power plants until we sorted out all the problems that a 100% wind and solar power economy would have.
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