Sprouted grain and nuclear power

I am not going to lie...I spend a lot of time talking and thinking about energy production.  I have to blame some of this on my brother.  You see, he is also a Mines student.  A junior electrical engineering major focusing on power generation.  Between that, me going to school for nuclear engineering, and the fact that we live together, I spend a lot of time discussing the issues.  The other day though, my brother pointed me to an interesting article on the true economic costs of using coal to produce electricity.

The article was interesting based on its scientific merit alone, but I found it very interesting thanks to an interesting analogy it made.  Personally, I had never thought of coal-fired power plants as being like junk food.  This I think is the perfect way to describe them though!  Junk food is cheap, it tastes good, and makes up a large percentage of the food that most Americans (at least college students) consume.  The bad part about junk food is that it is not good for you.  It is unhealthy and it most likely will have greater cost down the road in the form of heart attacks and what not. 

Coal is cheap and it makes the electricity bill easy for the consumer to withstand.  Aka, coal "tastes good" to the normal person.  It is also dirty and hard on the environment.  It causes thousands of early deaths each year in the United States and the emissions of coal-fired power plants are putting things into the atmosphere that we don't really want there.  Using coal is kind of gearing us up for a planetary heart attack just like junk food does to our body.

You see, I have been trying to avert away from the college diet myself, so this analogy is especially interesting.  I have recently become a fruitaholic and I have even become that crazy guy in the grocery store reading all the labels.  Why you might ask?  Well, because I am interested in my general health.  Do you see where I am going yet?

The article didn't really finish the analogy you see.  While there is junk food, there are also food out there that are good for you.  Incidentally, there are also energy forms out there that are good for us.  This is where the industry is so interested in going nowadays.  Renewable energies are the albeit more expensive forms of energies, but they are the types of energies that are ultimately more healthy for our environment.

Many people use the argument that nuclear power is simply too expensive to implement.  Those of you who have been following me for a while know my opinion on this, but right now it is true that nuclear power has a high capitol cost compared to coal-fired power plants.  Have you ever gone into a grocer store and bought foods that were healthy for you?  Well, when you do you will notice your grocery bill sky rocket.  It is a general fact that higher quality products demand a higher cost.  For our well being, it is just a price we choose to cope with.  To ensure that we are nicer to our environment, we need to be willing to spend more money.  There is such a thing as electricity being too cheap when it is promoting the use of unhealthy power producing practices.  Junk food is too cheap, and that is why college kids have such unhealthy diets. 

Economics still must play a role though.  We must choose the method that provides the reasonable benefits we need without being too expensive.  Is it always worth buying the most expensive health food when trying to eat healthily?  Not really, considering we can gain the same health benefits by eating reasonably healthy.  We shouldn't go overboard and put all our resources toward an energy form that will accomplish the same thing as an energy form that has much less over all cost.  Solar and wind power are both more expensive than nuclear power in dollar cost as well as in the impact cost.  They require huge tracks of land (yes, I said that on purpose)  and are not up to optimal efficiency at this point.  Nuclear also has issues associated with it as far as waste and safety go.  My point?  We don't have an energy solution yet.  What we do know is that we need to try and change our diet.  Our long term health depends upon it.