The last year has brought fatal oil rig explosions, massive spills and coal mining tragedies have killed miners and polluted streams. Meanwhile, searing heat and fires in Russia, catastrophic floods in Pakistan, and the long-running Australian drought are glimpses of the troubled future we might face from climate change if we keep spewing emissions from fossil fuels into the Earth's atmosphere.
Sure, it would be ideal if we could replace oil, gas and coal with renewable energy, but it's not going to happen for decades, if ever. As Germany has discovered with wind and Spain with solar, renewable sources of power are still hugely expensive with capital costs, maintenance costs and land requirements that far exceed any other method that produces equivalent amounts of power.
However, an even bigger problem is reliability, as renewables only work between 10 to 20 percent of the time (when the wind blows or the sun shines). That makes it fiendishly difficult to balance supply and demand as these sources cycle off and on randomly, thus destabilizing the electrical grid.
So what's left? The answer is obvious: Nuclear power.
Sure, it would be ideal if we could replace oil, gas and coal with renewable energy, but it's not going to happen for decades, if ever. As Germany has discovered with wind and Spain with solar, renewable sources of power are still hugely expensive with capital costs, maintenance costs and land requirements that far exceed any other method that produces equivalent amounts of power.
However, an even bigger problem is reliability, as renewables only work between 10 to 20 percent of the time (when the wind blows or the sun shines). That makes it fiendishly difficult to balance supply and demand as these sources cycle off and on randomly, thus destabilizing the electrical grid.
So what's left? The answer is obvious: Nuclear power.
