Assignment 16- Quinn Andrews

Humans have the remarkable ability to create something out of nothing. Or, that’s what we believed hundreds of years ago. Our ancestors used wood and friction to create a flame. They didn’t know what friction was though, or that it converted the kinetic energy of spinning the wood into heat and causing a spark. As we progress, our energy sources have become increasingly complicated. We started mining coal to burn, during the industrial revolution and eventually oil. It has only been recently that the short-comings of this resource have been explored in depth. Burning coal releases tons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere and has significantly contributed to global warming. More importantly for the purposes of this speech is the fact that it’s a non-renewable resource. We are going to run out, and sooner than we think. With our current energy usage on the rise, we have no safety net at the moment. But a plausible energy source is available when we consider our current needs. Many people will disagree with me when I say the best path towards sustainability is nuclear power. The reason so many people disagree with this statement is the misinformation permeating our society about nuclear power, but also energy in general. When considering this misinformation as well as the challenges inherent in different energy sources and the need for a sustainable solution, it becomes clear why nuclear energy can be a powerful option- pun intended. When listening to groups, like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, warning off nuclear energy we often find the same vocabulary: Expensive, dangerous, radioactive, cancer-causing, wasteful, fatal, and melt-down. Many of these are exaggerated or even just plain incorrect. “There is still no safe, reliable solution for dealing with the radioactive waste produced by nuclear plants. Every waste dump in the US leaks radiation into the environment.” This is straight off of Greenpeace’s website. They’re in for a little bit of a shock if they ever crack a nuclear engineering textbook. Power plants are specifically designed for safety, including a staggering amount of linings. The reactor rods are kept in the reaction vessel, which is eight-inch thick steel. Next is a bio-shield, which is four feet of leaded concrete and inch-thick steel lining on the inside and outside of the bio-shield. A dry-well wall, where emergency coolant can be pumped in if the rods overheat, is five feet thick (Nuclear Generation). All those protections add up, especially when those are only the interior linings, but I imagine you are all getting bored of me describing walls. My point is, we are scrupulous when it comes to safety. The average person in the US absorbs 300 millirem from background radiation. Living within fifty miles of a power plant will increase your exposure by about .01 millirem per year according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Nuclear waste suppositories like Greenpeace is talking about give off the same amount of Yttrium as a single banana holds (Pandora’s Promise). That’s all I need to say on the matter. It doesn’t sound as scary when it’s phrased that way. Our greatest fears are extreme exposure due to reactor meltdowns. The meltdown at Fukushima in 2011 was caused by a tsunami knocking out emergency coolant systems. The ensuing chaos was contained within a couple of days. In a couple of weeks, the system was considered cool and stable again. The exposure to everyday citizens equaled about .21 millirems more than the average background radiation of the area (World Nuclear Association). In May of 2013, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation concluded that no attributable health consequences have been discovered and are unlikely to occur to the general populace and the majority of workers. Now, I’m not saying this was not a mistake, or a tragedy. It never should have happened, and people have lost homes and family members to this accident. Yet, a mistake should not justify the complete abandonment of a program. If so, coal would not be in use today. It would be ideal if we could choose our energy sources off of simply what is cheapest, but this is not the case. While fossil fuels are the cheapest monetarily, we pay that price in lives. The numbers are staggering, and jarring enough that simply telling you isn’t enough (show the extra image). This represents the number of deaths per terawatt hour of energy. I did the math, and there are 2250 times more deaths per terawatt hour for coal than for nuclear. That is not surprising. What is shocking to me is that the number of deaths is 11 times larger for solar power than it is for nuclear power. This is because of the toxicity involved in producing solar panels. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still very safe in comparison but it is still larger, and a challenge we face with solar power. Now I’m not trying to say solar power is inferior. It’s not, but it has its own set of challenges. When we think of solar power, we think of shiny rows of panels, soaking up solar heat and converting it into electricity. Yet there is one issue with that, and it’s the fact that the sunlight we see is not always strong enough to produce energy. Here in Kentucky, during the sunniest month of the year, June, there is on average 6.8 hours of viable sunlight. A standard meter-by-meter solar panel will produce one kilowatt per hour during sunlight hours. 6.8 kilowatts sounds great right? But the average American household uses 5 kilowatts per hour. With a solar panel, you can keep your house up and running for a little more than an hour. You might be able to generate enough solar power to produce enough energy to keep a house running all day, but that is when we run into our next problem—storage. We do not yet have the proper capacities to store energy for long periods of time, so when the sun sets we’re out of luck according to Dr. Andrews of the University of Kentucky. A couple of years ago, a few students got a little cranky that the University of Kentucky was not utilizing wind power. So, it became a class project. The windiest part of the university had an average wind speed of zero, because the wind would never blow in a consistent direction but rather all over the place. At the Arboretum, it would be possible to build three two-kilowatt wind turbines, which would produce maybe six kilowatts a day. You could keep a house running for an hour! Sadly, the university uses a couple megawatts. It would be wonderful if we could use wind power on a regular basis, but as this project shows, it’s not a viable solution to our problems. Hydroelectric power has less issues with the above charges. Rivers are constantly flowing, and thus have no real time in which they can’t be used. This also means that storage is less of an issue because you can always draw energy from the source if the storage runs out. Instead we have a different problem. Where we can use hydroelectric, we already are. We would need to create more sensitive facilities that need less current to create more power. There has been some serious debate over whether nuclear power is renewable or nonrenewable. In a way, it is both. Uranium will eventually run out. It can be considered renewable though because you can refine uranium multiple times to create power. At the moment, generators have been designed for up to a fourth refinement of uranium. The US at the moment does not reuse its nuclear waste because of the worry that the cast-off could be used in weapons, though the more refinements, the harder it is to weaponize. If we reused our uranium, the waste so many are worried about would virtually disappear. Even without reuse, our current known uranium supply will last 285 years, according to Dr. Fetter from the University of Maryland. It is estimated that our known supply as of now is roughly a third of existing uranium, and as mining improves, it will last longer. Nuclear isn’t the be-all end-all solution, but it is the most viable option at the moment for us. The move away from fossil fuels is necessary, but it is impossible to switch to solely renewables right now without asking people to turn off their heaters and refrigerators. Nuclear is safer than commonly thought, and produces more energy than any other low carbon dioxide emission source. In the future, we may be able to rely solely on renewable energies, but until technology has advanced far enough, we need another source. Nuclear power should be that source.