When considering how we decrease our reliance on fossil fuels and reduce our carbon emissions many people instinctively believe our liberation will be found in renewable sources of energy such as wind turbines and solar panels. This simply isn’t true for a whole host of reasons.

We are still unable to efficiently store power from solar panels collected during the day. To use a dam as a giant battery (pushing the water uphill and converting the gravitational potential energy) requires the right kind of dam and a tremendously expensive retrofit. This water is also already needed for irrigation and cities. California has literally had to block energy coming from solar farms and has paid neighbouring states to take it just to avoid blowing out its grid. As far as battery technology goes, let’s just say the progress is too slow to consider it a viable option. Building these solar farms is ecologically devastating in the first place. When building one of the larger farms in California developers were forced to hire biologists to remove threatened desert tortoises and transport them. Many subsequently died.

Wind turbines introduce their own problems, and the killing of endangered bird species is among them. They may not kill many birds, 1 million a year as compared to the billions killed by house cats. However, the birds they do kill are at risk of extinction; hawks, eagles, owls, and condors.

The problem with renewables isn’t fundamentally technical, but natural. To produce more energy more area is needed - cheaper panels reduce the upfront expense but aren’t magically more practical. Germany is celebrated f or its move to renewable energies, but its carbon emissions have been flat since 2009 despite an investment of $580 billion by 2025 in a renewables-heavy electrical grid. France is producing one tenth the carbon emissions per unit of electricity and pays a little over half for it. France uses nuclear power. Unfortunately though, forced by Germany to invest $33 billion in renewables over the last decade, there has been a rise in carbon intensity of its electricity and an increase in electricity prices. Nuclear is actually cheaper in the long run as well. Its disadvantage is that 80% of its costs are up-front whereas when considering solar panels and wind the high costs of transmission lines and new water dams or other forms of battery aren’t factored in.

Nuclear power produces heat without fire, emitting no air pollution. Smoke from fossil fuels and biomass results in the premature deaths of 7 million people a year according to the World Health Organisation. Nuclear plants have actually saved nearly 2 million lives to date which would have been lost to air pollution. The WHO estimate that Chernobyl, the worst nuclear disaster ever, has been responsible for a relatively tiny 4000 deaths.

A solar farm required 450 times more land to produce the same amount of energy as a nuclear plant. The energy density of nuclear also means there is a tiny amount of waste. A single Coke can’s worth of uranium provides enough energy for the most gluttonous Western lifestyle. That waste is placed into a canister stored in a warehouse where, like all spent nuclear fuel, it will hurt nobody. Solar panels, by contrast, require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants. They also create 200 times more waste.

The future is nuclear people. Embrace it!