What Powers You?

So the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is a bit of an issue as of late. With this comes a plethora of debates as to what to do, who's fault it is, and exactly how much oil is being pumped into the ocean a day. Whether they eventually decide on a few hundred thousand gallons or a few million gallons, there does seem to be a general consensus... That this spill as it stands now, is going to cause massive amounts of ecological damage. This terrible incident has put into the minds of many that maybe oil is bad and there needs to be another solution.

Now I'm not about to get all hippy about this. I understand that alternative fuel is a subject that is a lot more complex than many people would like to admit. Electrical power is not the solution as it does not get us off our dependence of oil. Electricity comes from generators that run on petroleum based fuel. The only difference is you're not getting the oil from the tap at a gas station, think of that the next time you charge up your hybrid.

Solar and Air power are still in their infancy, too small and inefficient for our daily needs. Fusion is a pipe dream years away from any applicable usage, and hydro power is dependent on massive amounts of running water, which needs to be dammed. So whats the answer, how can we remove our dependence on oil in the near future? It would seem there is no other option, but there is. Nuclear Power.

The 1950s is known as the atomic age, people believed that with atomic and nuclear power, we would enter a new age of power and technology. Unfortunately there was the cold war, America and Russia went on mass making nuclear weapons, tainting this source of power to forever be associated with destruction. With this taint, a movement in the 1970s associated with the Green Party made a mission of getting Nuclear Power Plants shut down. While they did not get the plants shut down, they did make it illegal to produce new plants.

This whole movement was based on misinformation and exaggeration, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were used as poster children to show how dangerous nuclear power was. This made their point solid despite the fact that to this day there have been no death, illness, or ecological damage connected to Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl took place in an economically bankrupt Soviet Russia that could not afford tanks, let alone proper maintenance on a Nuclear Power Facility. Despite all of this, a powerful and almost unchangeable paranoia was connected to Nuclear Power, but now is really the time for the reemergence.

Right now there are about a hundred and three plants currently operating in the United States, and as I have mentioned the building of new plants was banned almost fifty years ago. Even with how safe our existing plants really are, there are new, safer, more efficient plants we cannot build. If we lifted this ban, with a couple hundred plants, we could remove our dependence on non-automotive oil, and within a few short years, be completely free of foreign oil. This would end up drastically changing the world economy and international relations, as well as lighten our imprint on this world.

Safety, of course, is what comes up when this issue is brought to life. As safe as we can make it, Nuclear Power Plants still produce radioactive waste. Currently this waste is stored at the individual sites, but a receptacle is currently being built in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. This miles deep hole would act as a place to store radioactive waste as oppose to storing it in the individual facilities, which as of now have limited amount of space. This hole in the ground, built specifically to hold this waste in a safe manner, is currently slated to be operational in 2014, if it doesn't have it's funding cut, something of which the Obama administration is trying to do.

And if you mention the dangers of attack, well, you're living in fear. I'll admit it's a possibility, however unlikely, but can you really hide behind that rationale? Can you tell me we shouldn't build skyscrapers now due to the threat of attack? The irrational fear of attack comes with any and everything, and sometimes we just have to brave the risk and accept we cannot know everything. But think of this, we currently now have over a hundred Nuclear Power Plants active, and there have been no attacks.

Sixty years ago man envisioned and enlightened age of atomic power. An energy source seemingly limitless, a power that we could produce with no foreign dependence. It was tainted, warped, and twisted by a militant arms race and misinformed environmentalists. But it's still a possibility, we hear the same old story of man seeking out an alternative energy source, when in fact it was discovered decades ago. Now, here today, we have the ability to make that power even better, safer, more efficient. But we're held back by our unjust fear and ignorance. This solution is not only available, but viable. So why aren't we using it?

The people around the Gulf of Mexico wouldn't oppose Nuclear Power if it would have prevented what's happening there today.