The second biggest contributor to climate change is the energy sector. The first is human activities. These contributors earned first and second place because of the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. So that begs the question: what’s the alternative? What other methods of energy production could replace coal, oil, and natural gas? There are a few options, the most popular of which would be solar and wind. These are methods that many countries around the world are already using and with great success. But it is incredibly expensive to store solar energy making it very inefficient. Meanwhile, wind turbines produce noise pollution, are very expensive, and take up lots of space. 

There is, however, a method of energy production that is not only efficient but produces high amounts of easily stored energy, producing very little to no carbon emissions and all for half the price of wind: nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy is no new concept. It was first thought up in the 1940s after the creation of the atomic bomb and first implemented in 1954. The biggest concern regarding nuclear power is its safety, due to popularized incidents such as Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Though, upon further investigation, these incidents ultimately all happened because of human error. The all-too-famous Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 occurred because of testing being done by inexperienced personnel who weren’t able to discern that something was wrong. The meltdown killed 28 of the site’s 600 workers and another hundred were given acute radiation sickness. Three Mile Island in 1979 was caused partially by mechanical failure and, again, partially because operators failed to realize that something was wrong, despite multiple warning lights and alarms going off. The incident did not kill or injure a single person, but exposed the nearby environment to the radioactive equivalent to a sixth of that of a chest X-ray. The second reactor at Three Mile Island remained active without issue until it was deactivated in 2019. The Fukushima meltdown was caused by the combination of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a tsunami that followed. These incidents have caused major reform in how nuclear energy is handled, leading to more safety measures and precautions.

An additional concern is nuclear waste. In the United States, nuclear waste is stored in steel-lined, concrete tanks filled with 40 feet of water. Water cools the spend rods and also serves to keep the radiation in. Water is extremely effective at blocking most types of radiation. In fact, you could swim in a reactor pool, and wouldn’t experience any more radiation than if you were swimming anywhere else. If you really wanted to, you could even drink from a reactor pool, and it would have no effect outside of what regular water does.

Now to the economic and environmental side of things: nuclear power has already provided a fifth of the United States’ power every year since 1990, producing 19% in 2023 with only 92 reactors. Eleven of these are in Illinois, the state with the most active reactors. Nuclear power produces no carbon emissions at all and is the most reliable source of energy by far. For one, nuclear power is able to produce energy at maximum capacity for over 92% of the year with second place being geothermal, which produces at maximum capacity 75% of the year. Nuclear power rarely needs maintenance and can go for as long as two years before refueling, compared to coal and natural gas which requires both maintenance and refueling constantly. One nuclear reactor produces one gigawatt of energy a year. For comparison, that is the equivalent of 431 wind turbines or around 3 million solar panels.

Nuclear power has been made safer to the point where there is very little reason to be concerned about meltdowns or disasters, and it’s the best form of, not just clean energy, but energy production altogether that humanity has access to. Nuclear energy is the future, and the future’s already here.