Among the few absolute certainties confronting the human race is the
growing need for energy. As the world's population approaches 7
billion, with no end in sight, it is perfectly obvious that mankind
must find ways of generating more and more energy to fuel both human
and technological growth.
In the 20th century, the solution to the problem was oil. Increasingly
across the decades, it ran our cars, operated our factories and
provided the motive power for all sorts of indispensable human
activities. Today, a technologically sophisticated society would be
unimaginable without it.
And yet, the world's supply of oil is far from unlimited. Already we
are being forced to look ever further afield for it, and the cost of
finding and exploiting new deposits of oil -- most recently, under the
world's oceans -- is rising inexorably. It doesn't take a soothsayer to
foresee that oil, as our principal energy resource, is a
fast-diminishing asset.
What is the alternative? There are shockingly few. Mining and burning
more coal obviously isn't the answer. Solar power is theoretically
attractive, but harnessing it is technologically difficult and
prohibitively expensive. Exotic alternatives like wind power are for
all practical purposes out of the question.
Fortunately, there has been available for more than half a century a
form of energy that is substantially infinite, ecologically inoffensive
and readily available. It is nuclear power, and it is the obvious --
indeed, the only -- solution to mankind's problem of producing more
energy.
It was nuclear power's misfortune to first be developed as a weapon --
the atomic bomb, which brought a swift end to World War II when two of
them were dropped on Japan. The human race was taught to regard nuclear
power as an evil -- indeed, a literally poisonous -- substance:
tasteless, odorless, invisible, yet capable of condemning thousands of
people to a painful death. The fact that it could easily be produced in
facilities that were perfectly safe, and which could generate virtually
limitless supplies of precious energy, was summarily disregarded. The
human race, by and large, simply rejected nuclear power as an
acceptable solution to the energy problem. (The environmentalists, of
course, made matters infinitely worse by falsely depicting nuclear
power as somehow inherently dangerous.)
The rejection was not total. France and Taiwan, two great economic
powers that lack ready access to coal and oil, today depend on nuclear
power for the vast majority of their energy needs. And nuclear power
plants exist elsewhere in the world, including in the United States,
although not nearly to the extent that economic common sense would
prescribe.
The ancient fears about the safety of nuclear power have long since
been proved wholly illusory. Indeed, there has never been, in the
entire 60-year history of the American nuclear-power industry, so much
as a single radiation-related fatality. (Compare that to the thousands
worldwide who die every year mining that supposedly "safer" fuel, coal.)
And yet the world's peoples, by and large, continue to shun nuclear
power. How long will this nonsense continue? As long, I suspect, as we
can squeeze enough oil out of shale and the world's ocean beds to
supply our basic needs (enriching the oil producers in the process).
Then, when we simply run out of oil, we will follow the French and
Taiwanese examples and turn quietly to nuclear power.
A day will come when our grandchildren will wonder what took us so long. I'm glad I won't be around to have to tell them.
