![]() ![]() The sun doesn’t always shine, nor the wind always blow, nor water always fall through the turbines of a dam. It’s a problem for all intermittent energy sources. Capacity factor is a measure of what percentage of the time a power plant actually produces energy. Second, nuclear power plants operate at much higher capacity factors than renewable energy sources or fossil fuels. But switching from coal to nuclear power is radically decarbonizing, since nuclear power plants release greenhouse gases only from the ancillary use of fossil fuels during their construction, mining, fuel processing, maintenance, and decommissioning - about as much as solar power does, which is about 4 to 5 percent as much as a natural gas-fired power plant. Switching from coal to natural gas is a step toward decarbonizing, since burning natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide of burning coal. ![]() What are nuclear power’s benefits? First and foremost, since it produces energy via nuclear fission rather than chemical burning, it generates baseload electricity with no output of carbon, the villainous element of global warming. Like all energy sources, nuclear power has advantages and disadvantages. Far from being the Devil’s excrement, nuclear power can be, and should be, one major component of our rescue from a hotter, more meteorologically destructive world. In my judgment, their condemnation of this efficient, low-carbon source of baseload energy is misplaced. They condemn it for its production and use of radioactive fuels and for the supposed problem of disposing of its waste. Switching to coal, in houses that usually lacked chimneys, was difficult enough the clergy’s outspoken condemnation, while certainly justified environmentally, further complicated and delayed the timely resolution of an urgent problem in energy supply.įor too many environmentalists concerned with global warming, nuclear energy is today’s Devil’s excrement. Coal was black, after all, dirty, found in layers underground - down toward Hell at the center of the earth - and smelled strongly of sulfur when it burned. In the late 16th century, when the increasing cost of firewood forced ordinary Londoners to switch reluctantly to coal, Elizabethan preachers railed against a fuel they believed to be, literally, the Devil’s excrement. ![]()
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