Vanity: Is It Worth Poisoning Our Children?

The United States is the world’s largest consumer of energy, and has been for decades. We are excellent consumers of electricity, finding new and exciting ways to burn natural resources without cause or reason. We have electric can openers, plug-in air fresheners, the George Foreman Grill, plasma screen televisions, and the combination curling brush/hair dryer. However, buying all of these wonderful toys has a price, and we are dumping the cost of these ‘necessities’ on the environment, on the world economy, and on our children. The more electricity we use on consumer-useless items, the more resources we have to destroy to make our houses smell good and our hair look nice, and once we burn through a ton of coal, or 1000 cubic feet of natural gas, or an uranium fuel pellet, these resources are nothing but waste products for the next generations to deal with. If we are going to have an integrated energy policy that makes any logical sense, it must be consumer driven, not industry driven. When are people going to understand that a kilowatt saved means more than a few dollars off the electric bill?

Clean Coal, Cheap Foreign Oil, Yucca Mountain, And Other Urban Myths.

Electricity comes from a variety of power sources, but the Big Three are coal, petroleum, and nuclear plants. These three form the basic building blocks of our nation’s power grid, churning out over 70 percent of our nation’s electrical power. Coal plants are predominantly smaller in capacity and pollute the most, while nuclear plants are the big ones, generating the most power per plant and producing the least amount of waste. All of these power generation types do the same thing; namely, they heat water, which turns into steam, which is used to turn a turbine to generate electricity. They also each generate waste products, and these waste products are the sticking points of our nation’s energy problem.
Coal, the leftover from the Industrial Revolution, is the dirtiest of all of the energy providers. Mining coal destroys arable land, burning coal poisons the air, and its fallout poisons the water. However, coal is cheap, easy to find, and local, meaning that we do not have to import coal to burn for energy purposes. Coal is a baseline energy source, with roughly 40 percent of the nation’s power grid coming from coal-fired plants. In recent decades, several upgrades have been added to scrub the smoke before it is released from the plant, and there are alternatives available to releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. However, none of these additions and improvements deals with the coal ash waste products, or effectively removes greenhouse gases from the burning processes. Clean coal is still dirty.
Cheap foreign oil is the second leg of US energy policy, and it is no longer a viable option. With energy speculation in the past few years pushing oil over $100 a barrel (it costs Saudi Arabia $1 to pump a barrel of oil out of the ground), cheap foreign oil is no longer a feasible alternative. In addition, the burning of petroleum, as with all hydrocarbons, releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere along with other particulate pollutants, contributing to ozone depletion, smog, and airborne carcinogens. With India and China as new emerging economies, the demand for oil has grown faster than new supplies, so the price of oil in the long run will only go up until all of the easy-to-find reserves are tapped dry.
The third component of our energy grid presents a different problem. Nuclear power produces no airborne waste, no water waste, and no pollutants. It requires no strip mining, no super tankers, and produces roughly 90 cubic feet of waste per year, enough to fill a phone booth. Nuclear power plants produce more energy per plant than almost all of the other power plants, with only 104 plants providing almost 20% of the nation’s electricity. The problem is the waste generated is immediately dangerous to life and health, and requires special handling and storage so the public is not exposed. All of the waste from spent nuclear fuel is currently stored on site at the power plants where it is kept in large spent fuel pools. An attempt to make a central storage site for spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nevada is currently on hold, and the waste continues to pile up at power plants.

It’s Not The Number Of Drops, But The Number Of Buckets.

Since the power industry is driven by demand, the key to reducing the amount of waste begins with reducing the demand. Simply put, if we can reduce demand, we reduce the amount of power generation necessary and therefore reduce power generation waste. With our penchant for shiny electrical toys, this might be difficult for some, but in order to reduce our burden on the planet’s resources, decrease the amount of pollution in the atmosphere, and save money in this tight economy, those shiny toys will have to wait for a while, or at least become more energy efficient. What we need to do is this: if we can reduce our electric consumption by 10 percent, we can shut down a few coal plants. Let’s get to work on that 10 percent of household electricity that we are burning up for no reason!

So, What Can I Do To Help?

* Electricity is an indirect power supply. Human power works just as well for small tasks, like opening cans, raking leaves, and drying hair. Human power is readily available, and the more we use, the healthier we are!
* A plasma screen television uses 8 times the electricity of a regular television. Rather than incurring the added costs of upkeep for a big screen plasma television, just keep the normal T.V. set. There isn’t anything worth watching anyhow, even with 100 channels!
* Use the lowest wattage light bulb possible in all rooms of the house. Most rooms only require enough light for reading and mood lighting. Light your house like a house, not like a Wal-Mart.
* Every once in a while, open the windows. It airs out the house, lets in sunlight, and provides a healthier environment than being cooped up in a box with the same bacteria all the time.
* Keep your house a little warmer in the summer and a little cooler in the winter by adjusting your thermostat. Home heating and cooling wastes most of the electricity in the home, and a few degrees warmer or cooler have a direct immediate impact on your electrical demand, as well as your electric bill.
* Use the washing machine during off-peak hours. Wash your laundry in cold water whenever possible. Today’s modern detergents are powerful enough to work in cold water.
* If possible, turn down the temperature of your hot water heater. Since you are going to mix it with cold water anyhow for almost all uses, it just makes more sense, and saves money immediately!
* Give the dishwasher a break, and use the sink. Only use the dishwasher on full loads of dishes, and use the husband and kids for the small loads. It’s good family bonding time!
* Dine in at home. A casual-dining restaurant wastes more electricity in a month than the average household uses in a year just to make food you can prepare at home for a fraction of the cost.
* Keep the refrigerator as empty as possible, and the freezer as full as possible. Every time you open the door to the refrigerator, it costs you a quarter in energy costs. A good rule of thumb is a 3 day supply of food in the refrigerator, with the rest being frozen and thawed for use as needed.

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