The International Energy Agency projects 65 percent growth in world energy demand by 2020. Two questions pop up: How will we meet this energy demand and what are the environmental consequences of our choices?

When we consider these issues we confront three vexing realities. First, fossil fuels (i.e., oil and coal) are our cheapest, most available sources of energy. The U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with 25 percent of the world’s reserves, double those of the next largest source, China.

Second, billions of the earth's poorest are just climbing out of desperate poverty. Affordable energy is essential to their successful escape… and they know it.

Third, burning fossil fuels causes air pollution and contributes to climate change.

Can we provide affordable and reliable energy for the world’s least fortunate, while simultaneously combating global warming?

What about renewable energy, like solar? A Bozeman friend grins whenever the energy from his residential solar array causes his electric meter to spin backward. For him, electricity prices can’t go too high.

Solar has great potential, especially for remote, off-the-grid applications. And passive solar construction ought to be a standard design feature in the Northern Rockies, where winters are long, cold, and sunny. But high initial costs and long payback times will limit solar’s widespread adoption for power generation. Wind and tidal power have similarly limited applications. I’m afraid we confuse hopes with realistic expectations if we believe that wind, solar, or tidal power will soon meet our base load energy demands.

In contrast, coal is cheap and abundant. In the U.S. it generates 52 percent of our electricity. Its share of our energy portfolio will surely increase. Changing this future is especially difficult. In addition to its abundance and low price, coal has a powerful political constituency.

China consumes almost half the world’s coal production, using it to supply 75 percent of its annual energy demand. In addition to emitting CO2, coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. Coal ash is radioactive. A typical coal-fired power plant releases about l00 times as much radioactivity as a comparable nuclear plant. Toxic heavy metals such as mercury are particularly nasty byproducts.

Mercury falls downwind on land and into the oceans. It becomes toxic as methylmercury. It moves up the food chain, eventually accumulating in the fat cells of fish. As a result, pregnant and nursing mothers who eat large amounts of salmon and tuna can expose their children to mercury poisoning.

Because of our stack scrubbers, the U.S. produces only 1 percent of non-natural global mercury emissions. China accounts for 25 percent. No serious person believes the Chinese will place the world’s environmental and health concerns above their own economic interests.

The Critical Reality

All energy production has environmental impacts. For example, wind farms cause visual and noise pollution and kill birds. Our choices involve trading off among imperfect alternatives.

Is it time we rethink opposition to nuclear power? James Lovelock, promoter of the Gaia hypothesis, believes so. He writes: “Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media.… [N]uclear energy… has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. I entreat my friends… to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy.”

France generates 79 percent of its electricity from nuclear power; Belgium, 60 percent; Sweden, 42 percent; Switzerland, 39 percent; Spain, 37 percent; Japan, 34 percent; the United Kingdom, 21 percent; and the United States, 20 percent. With 434 operating reactors worldwide, nuclear power meets the annual electrical needs of more than a billion people.

If we move forward with nuclear power we’ll need to address many challenges. They include safely disposing of radioactive waste (a political more than a technical problem), the high cost of nuclear power (currently it can’t compete with coal), and security. As we see with Pakistan and North Korea, proliferation is real.

Of course, nuclear power is not 100 percent safe. Nothing is. But the relevant fact is that nuclear power is safer, and more environmentally friendly, than any feasible alternative.