Why it's important

You may wonder why a website dedicated to sustainability is giving a nod to a technology that involves mining and refining a material, using it up, and then disposing of the toxic waste. It's not a particularly sustainable or renewable process, we admit, but it passes the "better than coal" test. The reason why nuclear is worth another look is because, while not renewable, it is a mostly clean technology. Right now, the big issue facing the world is Climate Change, and nuclear energy is a way to produce a lot of energy with very little in the way of greenhouse gas emissions.

As great as wind and solar are, and for all of the potential that they have to be major portions of our energy portfolio going forward, demand is increasing and old power plants are coming offline at a rate that these technologies are unlikely to match. Wind and solar are going to need some support for the foreseeable future, especially until we get large scale Storage established. And if we are going to need some power to back up Wind, Solar, and any Emerging Technologies, it's better that it be nuclear power than fossil fuel. There are some problems with nuclear energy, it is not an ideal fuel by any means, but the CO2 released in large quantities by fossil fuel power plants is damage we currently don't know how to undo.

Nuclear energy is inexpensive once it is running, although it is rather expensive to build at the moment. It does produce some emissions as a result of mining and refining processes, but they are very, very low compared to natural gas or coal and would go down as the overall economy moves towards less carbon-intensive fuels. The CO2 emissions from nuclear aren't a result of the process of actually creating electricity, as they are for fossil fuels.

The nuclear waste problem is in fact a large problem that must be addressed, but the wastes are concentrated and so can only cause so much damage, as opposed to fossil fuel emissions, which have global effects. It's important to deal with this issue, but it's not such a large issue as to make nuclear power worse than fossil fuel power. If done in concert with other clean energy sources, energy conservation, and large scale energy storage, nuclear energy could be a very positive part of our energy portfolio moving forward.