Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Electric cars are almost here, thank goodness. Burning up incredibly valuable and irreplaceable petroleum just to move our overweight butts around borders on criminal. We need petroleum for so many more important things, such as plastics, chemicals, lubricants, asphalt, and fertilizers; not to mention the environment damage of releasing all those hydro-carbons into the atmosphere. However, increasing electricity demand requires increasing electricity production, and using oil for that doesn't solve the problem. Coal-for-oil is not a desirable trade-off, damming rivers is out, and geothermal, wind, wave, and solar all offer only a pittance of the energy needed. Where do we go?

With nuclear power, there is no energy shortage. Nuclear-generated electricity is almost free, and new reactor technologies are now emerging from companies such as NuScale, Hyperion, mPower, and Toshiba that address past complaints. These reactors are all small, truck transportable, safe from terrorists, and produce minimal amounts of radioactivity and waste. Nuclear power was the wave of the future in the past. The abandonment of nuclear power was an unfortunate side-effect of the Cold War, but the generation that will soon be assuming political office, and the voters who select them, will not have the same irrational fear of the word "nuclear." It seems probably that a decade or two from now we will see full utilization of this unlimited energy source. It only takes political will and the passing-on of the "no" generation.