Lights On Oregon Blog: A Look Back at Nuclear Energy
This is number three in a series of posts summing up what the Lights On Oregon Blog has covered in the last two months. On Sunday we examined geothermal energy, and last week we noted the power of wind. Today we are going to explore nuclear energy. As was shown in our first post regarding nuclear energy, the U.S. must start generating more nuclear energy. Moreover, according to the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy there is no country more addicted to the use of fossil fuels than the U.S. We concluded this article by declaring:
Diversity in energy is critical. When we rely on one source for energy (fossil fuels), we are forging a dangerous path for our future.
Next, Brazil announced that they are going to build 60 new nuclear power plants. When these plants are built, Brazil will look much like France where nuclear power has been a huge success—it now generates 76% of all of their electricity. We concluded the article by stating that
This is the fact of the matter: nuclear works. It’s clean. It’s safe. It’s financially competitive.
Next, we demonstrated that clean secure energy requires nuclear power. For According to Robert J. McTaggart, assistant professor of physics at South Dakota State University in Brookings:
Because we stopped building large “base-load” power plants more than a decade ago, some regions of the U.S. face potentially damaging power shortages. Excess capacity in the grid system is falling, and some experts now foresee possible cascading blackouts or brownouts.
Finally, we noted that the environmental activist Mark Lynas even agrees nuclear is part of the equation for clean, reliable, and affordable energy.
