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Wind turbines vs nuclear power plants: what’s best?
The principle of wind turbines sounds a lot more compelling at first: transferring wind to electricity to run our society. This is accomplished via the two or three propeller blades spinning a shaft which is connected to a generator to create electricity. Today this concept isn’t very effective but scientists are constantly looking at new solutions to improve efficiency and twh, per example a “dragon”-shaped flying construction with wind turbines attached to it that will hover at 10 000 meters above the ocean and harvest electricity from jet streams circling the Earth.
So is wind power ready to take over the world and solve the global warming issue? Not quite. Because although wind turbines will become more efficient in the future they aren’t efficient enough to supply an entire country with electricity just yet, Germany is an excellent example. They tried to use wind turbines as their main source of electricity, but ended up having to invest even more in electricity generated from burning coal to keep up with high electric consumption.
So wind power isn’t ready just yet to supply whole countries with electricity, for that a combination of per example nuclear power and wind power is needed. Nuclear power specifically is unfortunately the most unstable source of electricity in today’s world. In case of a meltdown, environmental effects would be far beyond imaginable; horrifying scenarios like Chernobyl in Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan are unfortunately existing proof of this fact. Also there is the radioactive waste that is left behind that has a half-life of 100 000 years, as well as the radioactivity emitted by uranium when mined, uranium being the material used in today’s nuclear power plants.
However this is a well-known issue with nuclear power plants and scientists today are working hard to create new nuclear power plants which will be as secure as today’s science allows them to be. The positive side of nuclear power plants, no matter if they are safe or not, is that they generate significantly more electricity compared to wind turbines, around 60 twh per year compared to 10 twh per year. In the future nuclear power might have evolved from using fission to using fusion instead. This means instead of splitting the core of an atom we will instead fuse together 2 atom cores into one. This process will require 100 million degrees Celsius, but according to scientists infinitive amounts of energy can be generated.
So a conclusion: how do wind turbines stack up against nuclear power plants?
Well, wind turbines are definitely more safe, cheaper and easier to build and take down if necessary, but with today’s technology produce a lot less energy. Nuclear power plants produce many times more energy than wind turbines and have a higher potential amount of energy, but they are a lot less safe, they cost a lot more, the technology is more advanced and if something goes wrong many lives are lost and far more are destroyed.
Sources:
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vindkraft_i_Sverige
http://www.svenskenergi.se/Elfakta/Elproduktion/
http://www.tekniskamuseet.se/1/835.html
http://www.tekniskamuseet.se/1/841.html