A drastic change

There’s a lot of talk in the media about going green, alternative energy, and reducing fossil fuel emissions. I’ve heard lots of people telling me to reduce the energy I use, but to be honest it’s hard to put that in perspective. Since I live in a dorm, I don’t pay an electric, gas, or heat bill (I’m enjoying it while it lasts), so it’s hard to see how much energy I use and how to reduce it. I came across this video this afternoon and it does a nice job of explaining energy consumption in terms of light bulbs.

His point is that it’s going to take a lot more than just unplugging idle appliances and using CFL bulbs to reduce our energy consumption. A 90% reduction is recommended by climatologists, and that’s a drastic change. Trying to get all 61 million people of the United Kingdom to change so drastically in a reasonable amount of time would be about as easy as slowing the rotation of the Earth, so the solution is to find some way to generate electricity from non-fossil fuel sources.

A lot of people try to tell me than wind energy is the way to go, and while it is viable in certain areas a single turbine doesn’t produce much energy in the grand scheme of things. To genererate enough power to satisfy the UK, half of Britain would have to be covered by windmills. Literally half, that’s not just a figure of speech.

There’s obviously a discrepancy between the number of nuclear and wind plants that exist and the number needed to power the UK, so what makes up the difference? Fossil fuels: power plants using coal and natural gas to produce electricity. These are cheap and plentiful, but they also are very polluting and generally not nice to be around because of what they do to the air.

I’m telling you, nuclear is the solution for the next 50 years, until wind and solar are able to produce enough power. It’s the only way to still meet the demand for electricity while still cutting carbon emissions. This quote I saw a while back is stunning, and it pretty much says it all.

“A 1,000-megawatt coal plant is fed by a 110-car coal train arriving every day. A nuclear reactor is replenished by a single tractor-trailer bringing new fuel rods once every 18 months. Over the course of a year, the coal plant will release 400,000 tons of sulfur and fly ash. Some of this ends up in landfills, but most escapes into the atmosphere where it kills 30,000 people annually, according to the E.P.A. Then there’s the carbon dioxide — seven millions tons annually from each plant — which is the principle cause of global warming.” William Tucker, author of Terrestrial Energy.

Note the first part of that: 110 cars of coal every day, or a single truck every 18 months. I can’t decide which is better!