10 YEARS AND SINGING THE BLUES

As a child I had a different concept of time. It seemed like summer vacations were extremely short and the school year would last forever. It seemed like the Christmas season would never get here. Now that I am a little older time seems to go by at an ever-faster pace. Just a short 10 years ago most people would never have dreamed that the cost to buy fuel in this country would be taking the amount of our income as it is doing today. If the past 10 years are any prediction of the future we need to be doing some serious planning about our energy needs. Recently there was a meeting of Oklahoma Legislators where they discussed the potential of Nuclear Power to meet our energy demands.

Oklahoma's energy needs are expected to increase by 40 percent over the next 25 years. State Representative Doug Cox, R-Grove was quoted as saying, "We can't escape the fact that our energy demands are outpacing our capacity. It is perhaps easier in Oklahoma to just turn to natural gas and coal to meet our immediate demands and put off planning for the future. But if we don't even have a plan to at least meet our future minimum energy demands, then we can't possibly expect to attract and retain new business and sustain economic growth down the road." Experts told the committee that regulatory approval and construction of a new, 1,600-megawatt plant could take as long as a decade and could cost more than $8 billion, not including the multi-million dollar application process and the risk that worldwide construction demand could drive materials costs up significantly over the next decade.

 There are many positive points to nuclear power; it does not emit carbon dioxide or greenhouse gas, and it is also the cheapest way to produce electricity. The opponents of nuclear power claim that transporting the waste is a potential for danger. While that could be a danger, we need to remember that the military has continuously transported radioactive waste across the country for decades via highway and railroads. In that time, there have been eight accidents and none resulted in a leak of radioactive material.

I have become a proponent of nuclear power because it is the only feasible option we have. If we don’t get serious about our energy needs, in 10 years we may be singing the blues.