Should Nuclear Energy Combat Global Warming and Meet Energy Demands? 

Our Economics teacher asked ” when the fossil fuel is going to be exhausted”, the answer was obvious that in the coming few decades we are going to get exhausted from the fossil fuels. The answer to this question is not so straight, I will leave it for the conclusion of the essay. It’s a revolving scientific truth that it takes half a millenia to build two centimeters of living soil and only seconds to destroy it. Our mother planet earth never was in such urgency of climate crises as it is now. After the industrial revolution, the rapid development which needed alot of fossils to burn to run this world caused us a huge loss in the shape of global warming. The aftermaths of global warming are large caps of ice meltdown, hurricanes, forest fires,and drowning of big cities built on sea levels. The boom in economic activities, the need of energy for domestic consumptions, and all the industrial energy demand is growing day by day. To meet the electricity demand with net Zero greenhouse gas emissions,q the available renewable resources are not enough or expensive to attain. Furthermore, nuclear energy is going to act as a complement to the shortage of clean energy in the coming future. Nuclear energy should be included as a major component of 21st-century plans to combat global warming and to help us meet the energy demand.

It has come to my attention that the director-general of IAEA Rafael Mariano Grossi says Nuclear is, and will be, the part of the solution if we are to achieve the goal of limiting global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius in COP26 which was held in Glasgow. Few kilos of Uranium is enough to illuminate a whole city in contrast to that we need large reservoirs to store and to make the renewable energy functional. The first and foremost reason why to get implemented the idea of nuclear energy is because of the rate at which we are consuming the fossil fuel, it is alarming. Only 4 percent of global energy needs come from nuclear energy, and almost 84 percent of global energy needs are met by fossil fuels. The huge energy shortage after the exhaustion of fossil fuels cannot be filled with only renewable resources, so we need nuclear energy with great urgencies.

France and Sweden are producing 67% and 30% respectively of their energy demand from nuclear energy. Unlike fossil fuels, nuclear energy doesn’t release any kind of greenhouse gas, but people have reservations on the uranium or plutonium wastes it produces. The solution to the wastes of nuclear energy is simple reuse of the wastes or getting them disposed in an underground repository. What needs to be done for the 1 billion people who don’t have electricity access, they don’t have the illuminated bulbs. How to cover the shortage of energy for 2.5 billion people who are deficient of energy for domestic consumptions? I am certain that the future of energy demand can only be supplied with the nuclear energy.

I ask you to think about the disasters which occured in the last century. You would be probably thinking about the nuclear bomb which the US dropped on Hiroshima, the Charnobyl nuclear plant disaster of 1986 ,and obviously the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The casualties in these nuclear disasters are certain, and still, the above-mentioned places are not liveable. These accidents curved the humanity to think about nuclear energy/power to be a kind of Frankenstein’s monster. But, let me draw my points on this issue , there are more myths to this issue then facts. According to WHO, the air pollution accounts for an estimated 4.2 million deaths per year, in contrast only one person dies in 14 years due to nuclear radiations . This concludes that fossil fuels are the dirtiest form of energy while nuclear energy is the safest and cleanest.

The question arises in everyone’s mind is that being a cleanest form of energy why people still detest and create controversial paradigms around nuclear energy. It is because of the media, yes! Films like the “China syndrome”, “Godzilla vs Kong” , and like are making fictional stories very true to watch. If we start believing on the misconceptions and drawbacks of nuclear energy based on fictional movies, then how we are going to cope with the disasters of global warming. Academically speaking, it is right that we should be ashamed of the technological failures and mismanagement which caused the deaths in Chernobyl,but the death figure is still controversial, the deaths were between 25 and 60,000. So, believing in controversies rather than in facts is costing us the mistrust on nuclear energy. We need to get above from the fictional stories if we are to save the mother planet earth.

There are few more reservations of the developed world and some activists that the nuclear weapons in the unstable part of the world like Iran, India, North Korea, and Pakistan if mishandled can cause a catastrophe which can ruin the world. But, where there is conflict, there is politics. There are some clashes between US and Iran, and also there are some uprisings between Pakistan and India. These all are not nuclear issues, but political issues. Our leaders should have to handle them with proper negotiation channels. The US is likely to revive its 2015 JCPAO ( joint comprehensive plan of action) with Iran. It’s the Iran nuclear agreement with the US which is sometimes a concern. There are also few hesitations that if any attacks and sabotage of uranium enrichment plants, nuclear power plants,and natural disasters which can cause huge damages to the planet Earth, but in contrast, these are all probabilities, not possibilities. So, fearing about this and that would be very difficult for us to manage in the future. Today is the time to act likely and wisely.

It is to be noted that nuclear energy is safe and sound, but it might be expensive. The building of nuclear power plants and the infrastructure to the transfer of electricity can cost billions of dollars, but we can use the already existing system of electricity,it is for sure that the government has to invest in building the infrastructure in the coming future. Comparatively, nuclear power plants cost few more dollars, but it is more stable than the windmills which are only functional when there is enough wind to drive it , or the solar panels which don’t generate any kind of energy at night, and the electricity from the sea waves is only possible when the moon is near to the Earth. You know that the moon is not always there to generate the waves, that’s why depending on renewable energy sources is not always reliable.

I’m writing this in order to get your focus again on the question which I asked in the beginning of the essay. The teacher answered in pure economics tone that we are never going to get exhausted from the fossil fuels. The reason to this is that there is an opportunity cost ( what you are giving up to get something) which will abruptly increase for the finding, infrastructure, extraction, and refining of the fossil fuel because of it rarety. It is how our economy works , when the opportunity cost increases for a certain product,we opt for another product to substitute it. The opportunity cost for nuclear and renewable energy as compared to fossil fuels will remain quite low , we have to opt for them . In a recent interview when Yoval Noah Harari was asked about whom he would vote for in the elections , there were three points he gave but the most relevant one is ” I will ask if the politician has a policy to cope with the climate change”. Concluding the essay, nuclear energy is among the only hopes to save our world and it’s ecosystem. The world is though interconnected but it is interdependent, so we all need to come together on the issues like climate change and global warming. It is not your problem or my problem,it is our problem. “On climate change, we often do not fully appreciate that it already is a problem . We think it is a problem waiting to happen”Kofi Annan.