by Christopher Calder

Created on: March 27, 2008

British scientist James Lovelock, the father of the living earth Gaia theory, has stated that nuclear power is the only way to have a large human population on planet earth without causing global warming and destroying the environment. Nuclear power is the only technology that can produce an extremely high volume of energy using just a tiny amount of land and at reasonable cost, all without emitting any significant amounts of greenhouse gases. Energy conservation, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, and other energy schemes can help the cause, but nuclear power is the only major, core solution to global warming available to human beings.

Using nuclear power we can make synthetic gasoline and jet fuel directly from atmospheric carbon dioxide. This new energy scheme may be cheaper and more practical than using hydrogen as fuel, because it would require no changes to our existing energy distribution infrastructure. Intense heat from nuclear reactors is used to break down carbon dioxide into its component parts, carbon monoxide and oxygen. The carbon monoxide can then be combined with water in a catalytic process to make either pure hydrogen gas or more easily transportable liquid synthetic fuels that can be used in ordinary automobiles.

One of the benefits of nuclear power is that the United States already owns huge stockpiles of nuclear fuel in the form of nuclear weapons materials, which can be converted into fuel rods for civilian power production. If you consider the amount of uranium easily available in the earth's crust for mining, plus the use of much more plentiful thorium as fuel in breeder reactors, then the world has enough nuclear fuel to last for thousands of years; an essentially endless supply. Nuclear power plants efficiently output at least 93 times more energy than they consume over their lifespan, including the energy used in their construction and decommissioning.

Nuclear fuel rods can be reprocessed over and over again because only a tiny portion of the nuclear material is actually used up during each fuel cycle. When you reprocess fuel rods there is very little high level nuclear waste that needs to be stored at the Yucca Mountain Repository. The nuclear "waste" is simply reused as nuclear fuel, and that is part of the reason why France's nuclear power program has been so successful. France relies heavily on nuclear power plants and nuclear fuel reprocessing, and France has the cleanest air and lowest electricity rates in Europe.

The fears Americans

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