LETTER: We need to have the energy to save our economy

Greg Schenk

Will we be thrown back to the Dark Ages and left without electricity once the remaining coal supply is exhausted? No.

This should be the obvious answer with nuclear energy, a virtually never-ending energy source, available to us. However, this is not the case as Japan, Germany and other countries have recently been shutting down some nuclear energy plants. Germany has gone as far as to declare it will have all its plants shut down by 2022. We must not follow the trend of shutting down plants. We must increase the number of nuclear plants in the United States.

Danny Roderick, the president and CEO of Westinghouse Electric Company, said, “The industry and government policymakers alike recognize that nuclear energy must be part of any national energy policy and is the most certain environmental solution to keep us from going off the energy cliff without taking away our clean air.”

As Roderick says, nuclear energy is the most certain solution to stop us from falling into a severe energy crisis and thus an economic downturn. I agree fully with this statement because nuclear energy is an almost unlimited source of energy. Nuclear energy, compared with its main alternatives – fossil fuels or coal – produces much more energy per unit. Nuclear energy produces roughly 1 million times the energy per unit weight than fossil fuels per unit weight, according to Kirk Sorensen, a nuclear technologist.

Not only will we reap more energy from nuclear power plants than current fossil fuels, but we will also preserve our environment. Nuclear energy is clean energy. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, in order to produce the energy currently being produced in nuclear power plants using fossil fuel plants, 2 billion metric tons more of carbon dioxide per year would be released into the atmosphere. It makes no sense for us to close down these clean energy plants only to pollute the atmosphere with more carbon dioxide, especially when everyone is so worried about global warming, of which carbon dioxide is a main cause. A greater push for more nuclear plants must be started today if we not only want to save our economy, but if we desire to preserve our environment from the harmful fossil fuel plants’ pollutants.

Nuclear energy is also a cheap energy source for us to produce. The World Nuclear Association has said, “The total fuel costs of a nuclear power plant in the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 34 countries involved) are typically about a third of those for a coal-fired plant and between a quarter and a fifth of those for a gas combined-cycle plant.”

So in addition to producing almost 1 million times the energy, it only requires a third of the fuel. Nuclear energy needs to be taken very seriously when we consider where we obtain energy from in the future.

As a nation, we must make a greater push to make more nuclear power plants so as to avoid an economic downturn when fossil fuels are exhausted. I do not see why we would begin to shut down these plants in exchange for more pollution and the production of 1-millionth the power per unit weight. As citizens, we have the duty to push this medium of creating energy forward and not allow it to be shut down. If we fail to do this, our energy sources will eventually run out and we will be thrown into an age without electricity and thus face an economic downturn. Nuclear energy is the energy to save our economy.

Greg Schenk