Utah Free Press

Just NUKE it!

 

By Richard Okelberry, January 29th, 2009 – One of the most exciting proposals put forward by the Obama administration has to do with putting large amounts of money toward building a new electrical infrastructure to help free us from the dirty electricity produced by coal and natural gas.  Unfortunateltly, President Obama has chosen to focus on developing Wind and Solar power across the Midwest raising questions about whether this truly would be the most efficient way of eliminating our reliance on fossil fuels as a primary power source.  Unfortunately, the numbers just don’t seem to add up when compared to nuclear power.

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Let me get straight to the numbers.  The average Nuclear power plant produces 14.3 billion Kilowatt-hours of electricity while the average large Wind Turbine produces only 3 million Kilowatt-hours of electricity.  Do a little math and it quickly is apparent that to equal the output of one nuclear power plant, we have to build 4767 Wind Turbines.  To put this into perspective we would have to erect wind turbines end to end down 587 miles of California’s 650 mile coastline to equal the power generated by a single nuclear power plant.

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Also consider that it would take 93 square miles packed solid with wind turbines to equal the generating capacity of one nuclear station.  While that my not seem like much, Manhattan in New York is 23 square miles in area.  This means that for each nuclear power plant you would consume an area of land equal to 4 Manhattan Islands.  This would be an area, easily seen by the naked eye from space.  To replace our current 3.3 terrawatt (3.3 trillion watt) electric grid with wind power alone, we would have to set up a wind farm covering a solid 21484 square miles or twice the size of Maryland.  Even if viable, this would not allow for the extra production needed to finally convert our automobiles to plug in electric or hydrogen fueled.  Doing so would potentially require a solid belt of wind generators side by side across an area about the size of Texas.
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Now consider that even if we did build such large numbers of wind farms, we would never truly be free of fossil fuels.  You see, wind and solar power is power generated at the whim of nature not at the demand of consumers.  Because there is no efficient way of storing large quantities of power on the grid, electricity must be produced as it is needed.  As such, any power grid reliant on primarily Wind and Solar would need a second grid of fossil fuel plants like natural gas plants to provide nearly 100 percent of the power when it is dark and the wind simply isn’t blowing across the Midwest where these farms have been proposed.

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As someone who grew up in the Midwest, I can tell you for certain that while it can be windy with average wind speeds reaching the needed 13mph the wind across the Great Plains is far from constant with weeks going by without a breeze.  At these times we would be almost completely reliant on old fashioned fossil fuels.

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Nuclear on the other hand is clean, available on demand and already supplying 20 percent of our needs.  In fact, new techniques of recycling nuclear waste developed in France have created systems that thoroughly deplete radioactive by products down to the point where they have a radioactive half life of a mere 20 to 25 years.  This new technology means that rather than having our individual energy foot prints being measure in tons of gasses and toxins a year, each person would only produce on average a marble sized piece of low yield nuclear waste with the entire country producing waste that would easily fit on the surface of a football field.

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Another topic that isn’t being discussed much is the huge power infrastructure that would be needed to pipe power from the Midwest to the coasts.  Such a project would cause such a burden on the copper industry alone that copper could eventually compete with gold in value.  Spikes in copper prices have already climbed to almost unbearable levels for the housing industry which needs copper to build new homes.  Lining a home’s electrical system with what amounts to gold will have a serious effect on the housing industry and ultimately the price of homes.  Causing such a burden on one of the primary staples of our economy is pure suicide.   For you strong environmentalists out there, I want you also to imagine the massive strip mines that will have to be created to extract such large quantities of copper from the earth.

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The idea of freeing ourselves from foreign oil and fossil fuels is something that most everyone can get around.  Even those that reject the man made global warming theory will usually admit readily that they too would like cleaner air for their kids to breath and cheaper energy.  As such we all have the same goal.  All that remains is for us to decide how to accomplish this goal.

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I promise if we follow the direction of President Obama on this issue, our power grid will become the biggest failure of most any administration in history.  It simply won’t work because it can’t work.  I do not blame President Obama for taking this course.  Nuclear energy has long had a stigma about it in this country but the time has come us to finally give our President a viable option and reason to say no to environmentalists that have spent decades demonizing and opposing nuclear energy.  I would invite liberal Democrats to embrace nuclear energy the way that fellow liberal progressives in France have for decades.  Begin writing this administration and tell them that you at least want them to look seriously at nuclear power if they truly want to build the only truly viable, fossil free electric grid.