How Bad Are Nuclear Power Plants?

Let me start this by saying that nuclear power plants are not as bad as you think they are. In this post I'm going to compare nuclear power plants to dirty power plants [coal/oil/natural gas fired power plants].

I've heard a lot of bad publicity about nuclear power plants: Nuclear power plants kill people, radiation, meltdown... but they're no better than dirty power plants:
Dirty power plants are one of the largest causes of pollution, and that kills way more people than nuclear meltdowns.

Don't get me wrong, neither of these energy solutions are good, but nuclear power plants should not be the first power plants to be torn down.

And that's my opinion for today.

Nuclear Fusion

Nuclear fusion is the process of fusing atoms together. All atoms "want" to get to the atomic weight of iron, and so heavier and unstable elements will sometimes break apart [in a process called fission] and lighter elements in the right conditions will sometimes fuse together releasing energy. A nice example of natural fusion is the sun.

In this post though I want to write about harnessing fusion for energy. On paper the benefits of fusion to create electricity are tremendous: There is a huge amount of hydrogen in the sea that we could fuse, if we could get it working fusion could power us for a very very long time and the by product of it all is helium [which is useful, I'll try to post about that soon]. In real life fusion is more complicated: all attempts to create it have failed to get more energy out of the process than they put in [fusion requires a lot of energy to start a chain reaction].

In my opinion fusion could [and probably will be] humanity's main source of power in the distant future, but it is not a solution for our energy problem.

2014: A Golden Year For Solar Power

178. That is the number of gigawatts of solar energy in the grid right now. To get to this amount a record-breaking 40GW where added in 2014, and now the amount of solar energy in the world is 100 times the amount that we had in 2000.