The Future of Clean Energy: Natural Gas and Nuclear
This essay was originally delivered by one of my students in my Global Management Issues class in March 2023. I like to highlight the best speeches on my blog. I learn from my students every quarter and am in awe of their passion about understanding issues in our world. - J. Brogee
Good morning, what makes the world turn? Well, the answer to that can be a number of things, jobs, innovation, manufacturing, etc. But what fuels these? Power. Now power may sound like it is just another word. But it is so much more important than we may think, especially in regards to our environment as well. In the United State’s of America, the majority of our power comes from natural gas, coal and nuclear energy. Two of these probably sound more familiar to you, natural gas and coal. These two account for over 60% of our nation’s power alone, with natural gas coming in at 38.4% and coal at 21.9%. Meanwhile nuclear power provides for 18.9% of power. I believe that nuclear, perhaps in co-existence with natural gas, could and should provide for much more not just here, but globally (U.S Energy Information Administration).
We all have heard how scary coal can be for the environment, now unfortunately it is a rather dirty and highly used source of power. Are we ready to let go of coal? No, we need to have new power solutions, like nuclear, in place before we can prepare ourselves to phase out coal. What about natural gas? Well, it can be a very healthy solution that deals minimal harm to the environment. In the past few years, a natural gas power plant has been constructed where I am from, it is called Guernsey Power Station.
This facility uses combined-cycle technology, meaning that It uses natural gas powered turbines as well as steam turbines to power the surrounding area. This facility uses the excess heat produced by the gas turbines, and creates steam with the heat produced to power the steam turbines. This process creates 50% more power than a traditional gas plant. The plant also uses a dry cooling technology which reduces the plants water usage by 95% when compared to traditional water-cooled plants. It is achieving the lowest possible emissions obtainable by the plant. The plant may still seem like a bad thing to some of you, its still a fossil fuel plant, I understand. Hear this, “The Guernsey Power Station (GPS) is a 1,875-megawatt, natural gas fired energy generation facility that will produce electricity equivalent to the power needs of approximately one million homes.” There are currently about 140 million homes in the U.S, if we were to use only gas fired plants such as Guernsey Power Station, we would only need 140 plants to operate. Think of emission reduction if we could obtain that. Obviously we cannot, but that is why we need to combine the power of gas, and the power of nuclear to create an incredibly low emission power solution.
You may ask why not use energy sources like wind power? Well, one wind turbine produces about 2-3 megawatts of power, if you’ll recall, the Guernsey Power Station produces 1,875 Megawatts, that means that in order for wind to meet the same level as the gas plant, it would take 625 turbines on the low end. This might not seem like a lot, but think of how much area a turbine needs, but one turbine takes up to 80 acres of land according to Landgate. Meanwhile, the Guernsey Power Station takes up only 118 acres. Those 625 turbines we talked about would take up 50,000 acres of land. It simply is not a feasible solution. Not to mention the amount of ecosystem disruption that amount of wind turbines would cause.
Now obviously we can’t rely on 140 natural gas power plants, they can’t go everywhere, this is where we need to use more nuclear power as well. For starters, nuclear power is a zero-emission energy source, that means clean as can be. In 2020, the Nuclear Energy Institute estimated that the United States avoided over 471 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, that’s the equivalent of 100 million cars being taken off of the road. Now imagine if we could double the number of nuclear power plants we are using today. Like natural gas power plants, nuclear plants also require a small land footprint. A 1,000 megawatt facility needs about one square mile to operate, meanwhile, to produce that much power from solar energy, it would take 75 times that much land. That’s 3 million solar panels or 430 wind turbines. Does that sound feasible to anyone? Obviously there is still one area that we haven’t talked about when it comes to nuclear power, the waste. But the spent nuclear fuel burned at a plant can actually be recycled. The fuel is fed into a chemical processing system that separates the elements in the fuel, this can then be turned into a mixed oxide fuel that can produce more energy. And hopefully, with the ongoing research into nuclear fusion, we can create an even more effective, and efficient power solution in time.
In conclusion, I believe that in the future, we can as a world, need to look further into nuclear power and natural gas, as the energy solution. Producing the lowest possible emissions from these two, we can greatly reduce the damage that is done to our Earth, prolonging its life. We only get one planet, it’s best we provide her with the best that we can. And with technological advancements, and the science to help, we can achieve this goal.
References
Project overview. Guernsey Power Station. (n.d.). Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://guernseypowerstation.com/project-overview/
Does my land qualify for a wind farm? LandGate Resources. (2023, January 23). Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://landgate.com/news/2021/10/07/does-my-land-qualify-for-a-wind-lease/
3 reasons why nuclear is clean and sustainable. Energy.gov. (2021). Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-reasons-why-nuclear-clean-and-sustainable
