Nuclear Power Vs. Coal Power

Coal-fired plants contribute 70% of all our electricity. They are naturally dirty. They emit 2.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide every year, as well as other toxins, including nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide. These emissions are a major contributor to the greenhouse effect, and the global warming that has come in its wake. By themselves, they are estimated to cause the deaths of 24,000 Americans every year. Coal-fired plants need coal to feed them: coal mining is a major polluter in its own right, and modern practice of the removal of entire mountain tops to extract the coal beneath them is environmentally catastrophic.

Coal-fired plants can, it’s claimed, be cleaned up using carbon capture and storage technology. But some dispute that this can be done effectively, and in any event it brings with it the new problem of how safely to dispose of the resulting carbon dioxide. On the other hand, if a terrorist attacks a coal-fired plant, the worst result will be that the plant itself is put out of commission.

In contrast to regular coal-fired plants, nuclear plants are clean in operation. In contrast to coal-fired plants fitted with carbon capture and storage technology, the amount of toxic waste that they produce (in the form of spent fuel rods) is small and compact, and, nuclear proponents would argue, relatively easy to store safely over the long term. In their entire history of operation in the United States, nuclear power plants have been responsible for no deaths.

Like coal, uranium, the fuel used in nuclear generators, is mined. But it is only needed in relatively tiny amounts; which for many years recycled Russian warheads have supplied. When mining does take place (and it has not done so in the U.S. for a number of decades), it is on a much smaller scale and has far less environmental impact than coal mining.

Coal is dirtier and causes more harm year by year, mining it using modern methods is more destructive, and even if it is cleaned up the residual carbon dioxide will present a major long-term disposal problem. But that is only part of the picture. Nuclear reactors may be clean when they are working properly, but what happens when things go wrong, or when a terrorist successfully attacks or sabotages a nuclear power plant? The threat of a single nuclear accident, possibly attended by hundreds of thousands of deaths, may be the clincher in this argument.