What is the Safest, Cleanest, and Most Efficient Form of Energy?

It’s a stormy afternoon, and the day is dark and gloomy. You go to your kitchen and turn on the lights because there is no sunlight at all. You go over to an outlet and plug in your phone because it’s about to die. Suddenly, you hear a loud bang. All of the lights in your house shut off. The phone charger that you’re using stops charging your cell phone, your fridge stops making a buzzing sound, and the TV which was showing the forecast just shuts off. You realize that now your house is dark, your food in your fridge warms up, and now you can’t even entertain yourself because your phone is dead and your TV doesn’t work. It becomes very clear to you that electricity is crucial to our modern lives, and that without it, life would be very difficult. Sadly, the most effective ways of getting electricity and power for our daily lives is very harmful to our planet and to ourselves. So what exactly is the safest, cleanest, and most efficient form of energy that we have right now?

The form of energy that is most used by the US is fossil fuels, which makes up over 80% of the energy that is produced. Unfortunately, this also happens to be one of the most harmful forms of energy that we have. Fossil fuels and also the burning of wood and charcoal account for the premature deaths of about 5 million people! Obtaining coal and other types of fossils isn’t easy and many people that mine for these materials get severely injured or even die. This type of energy was what started the Industrial Revolution in 1760, and it hasn’t stopped since.

This shows the beginning of the industrial revolution. It uses coal and fossil fuels to power our societies. This form of energy hasn’t changed for centuries.

So, coal and fossil fuels are effective but are not at all safe for us and for the earth, so how about solar energy? Solar energy is very clean, it generates electricity with our sun’s rays. Sadly, solar energy only makes up about 1% of the United States’ energy. It is cleaner, safer, but not effective enough.

This is a solar panel, it uses the sun’s rays to give energy to our cities and homes on earth. It’s kind of like photosynthesis in a way.

Hydroelectric energy is another form of energy that uses water as its way of powering generators. Hydroelectric energy is when a dam is placed on a running river so that the moving water turns a turbine and makes electricity. It is really clean because it uses river water to spin a turbine, no emissions made. A downside to hydroelectric energy is that it could be dangerous and expensive because if the dam were to crack, it could mean serious trouble. One could only imagine what a disaster it would be if something like a hoover dam breaks and releases more than 10 million acres of water. About 6–7% of the U.S. is powered by hydroelectric energy because it does require the need to have a large enough river to actually make energy.

This is Hoover Dam. It is between Nevada and Arizona, it’s huge, and it produces ‘dam’ ton of energy!

One last form of energy that could be used is nuclear energy. For most people, hearing the term “nuclear energy” is something that scares them because they relate it to weapons or disasters like Chernobyl. Even though these disasters are very dangerous for many people, nuclear energy could possibly be the best type of energy that we have. In a very simplified version, nuclear energy is basically nuclear tubes of metal that heat up water to turn a turbine. The fuel rods are the things that cause nuclear reactions to happen inside of the core. The fuel rods are stored inside of lots of water which cools them so they don’t melt. The water is also there to be evaporated by the heat from the fuel rods. Since the fuel rods are so hot, they evaporate the water and the steam that comes out and rotates a turbine which makes energy for us.

Here we can see in the blue at the bottom right, fresh cool water gets pumped into the system. This cool water condenses the steam and moves it to the left in the yellow tube into the steam generator. The reactor vessel heats water in a cycle which goes through tubes to heat up the water in the steam generator. This makes steam and moves a turbine to power a generator. With that, we have nuclear energy!

So in a nutshell, a nuclear power plant is there to heat up water into steam that produces energy. Nuclear energy makes up over 20% of the power in the U.S., even though there’s only 60 nuclear power plants across the entire nation. This is because only one pellet of uranium 238 has the equivalent of 1 ton of coal used for energy. Nuclear energy is also clean because all the big clouds of smoke that come out of a plant are just water. Based on past events, nuclear energy is so safe that it would take about 14 years for just one person to die in an accident related to nuclear plants. So not only are nuclear powerplants super-efficient, but they are clean and extremely safe for us. On the downside, nuclear energy has a very bad reputation. In an interview, a student responded with this after being asked if nuclear energy was safe or dangerous:

“I think that nuclear energy is not good. I use a term that is called ‘Nuking my food’ whenever I heat my food in the microwave. Which is basically saying that I use nuclear energy in my food whenever I heat it up. Something else would be Chernobyl, which killed a lot of people in Russia. So, in my opinion nuclear energy is bad, but in some cases it could be good.”

This is showing that people really don’t understand the concept of nuclear energy too much. Some people say that microwaves work by using nuclear energy which could be dangerous even though microwaves don’t use nuclear energy. That goes to show how much of a negative view nuclear energy gets even with somethings that don’t correlate with nuclear energy at all like microwaves. Another fear people have over nuclear energy is things like Chernobyl. They are afraid another disaster like that could occur, but our technology has improved and our ways of running nuclear power plants have changed so that an accident like that won’t happen again.

In conclusion, we have a variety of ways to obtain energy for our cities and our homes that sometimes we forget where it all comes from. There are some energy sources that are cleaner than others and we should switch to those that are safer for our health as people, and the health of our planet. Some effective energy sources like nuclear energy adopt a bad reputation that isn’t deserved. It could be really beneficial if people realize just how precious nuclear energy is in our journey to clean up our planet.