Lately it’s difficult to think about anything except the recent horrific events in Japan. My heart goes out to everyone involved. Disasters like the earthquake and tsunami are mostly unavoidable; they are a natural part of our planet’s evolution. The ongoing nuclear disaster is another story.

The world would be quite a different place without modern technology and I enjoy most of it as much as the next guy. But when a technology holds so much potential for severe, long-term damage, we must know when to alter our course. Even without accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now Fukushima, many have known intuitively that nuclear energy is just too risky.

Often wrongly touted as a carbon-free source of energy, it is actually far from it. The life-cycle of nuclear energy production produces tremendous amounts of carbon emissions from plant construction, mining, fuel processing, plant decommissioning and waste handling, including transportation and storage (over both the short-term of decades and long-term of thousands of years). Renewable energy is orders-of-magnitude cleaner and infinitely safer.

Continue reading The Insanity of Nuclear Energy.