I live in the southern US, and though my landscape has mostly recovered from mining that took place years ago, I can still remember seeing the strip mining scars on the mountains in the distance. My mom lived in coal mining towns in Kentucky as a child, Lynch and Hazard (though I’m not totally sure Hazard mined coal.) I’ve been to Lynch; I’ve seen the old company store - I’ve seen the devastated landscape.

Though I’m not generally an environmentalist I do believe we should be good stewards of the Earth and its resources. Coal burning plants release all sorts of pollution, though I’m not sure about the entire global warming stuff, I can testify that the plant near my parents house has nearly doubled in size since the early eighties and every bit of it is used to try and get particles out of the air. They just finished building a new tower that has something to do with cleaning the discharge.

Environmental impacts aside, there’s the direct toll on human life just trying to get the stuff out of the ground. We all remember last year’s West Virginia mine accidents. In 2004 and 2005 there were a total of fifty coal mining deaths in the United States alone, and these were considered pretty good years. China managed to kill at least six thousand people in 2004 and some say it was more like twenty thousand!

Now as the title might suggest, this post isn’t really about coal but nuclear power. Before we get to that, I want to point out that there are a few other options to be considered before we move on to the ‘N’ word. The most eco-friendly would be wind and solar and are my actual favorites by far. But these options are a bit unreliable. The wind isn’t always blowing and the sun does eventually set, even on the British Empire.

Which brings us to nuclear power, the most misunderstood of all our options. The fact is, nuclear power is not only the most efficient but also the safest, cleanest and cheapest.

There have been two major disasters at civilian power plants - Three Mile Island in the United States and Chernobyl in the Ukraine. The Three Mile Island accident resulted in no deaths to the general public and no loss of nuclear material into the environment. The Chernobyl incident has resulted in 56 deaths to date - just higher than the two-year death toll in the safest mines in the world!

The Chernobyl plant lost about 5% of its nuclear material into the environment, mostly in the form of a dust located close to the plant while a bit spread into areas further out. The plant had no facilities in place to contain material if things went wrong, and many reports indicate things went wrong all the time. The design of Russian plants has since been changed and very few nations are still operating plants of that design.

Things went wrong at Three Mile Island too. The core melted but no nuclear material was released, proving that even 1979 containment technology worked. The standard, then and now, says containment buildings must be built to have just one failure in ten thousand years of continued operation. Military power stations meet a standard of one in one hundred thousand years but the most modern; both civilian and military meet the standard of one in one million years.

But even needing the containment field is unlikely these days. The Australian organization Uranium Information Center says: But the main safety features of most reactors are inherent, called a negative temperature and void coefficients. The first means that beyond an optimal level, as the temperature increases the efficiency of the reaction decreases (this in fact is used to control power levels in some new designs). The second means that if any steam has formed in the cooling water there is a decrease in moderating effect so that fewer neutrons are able to cause fission and the reaction slows down automatically.

Even environmentalists are getting warm and fuzzy with nuclear power. The Washington Post ran an editorial by Patrick Moore, co-founder of Green Peace singing its praises.

(Source: wikipedia.com)
(Source: FinancialSense.com)
(Source: uic.com.au)