Cost, clean and safe

Many countries have realized the importance of clean energy; however, the wish is good but difficult in practice. There are mainly three types of energy, fossil fuel, sustainable clean energy and nuclear power. None of them are perfect choice of energy at the moment. Fossil fuel is cheap and relatively safe (despite the danger of mining fossil fuel), but it is not clean that it generates lots of pollution including enormous amount of carbon emission. Nuclear power seems to be the perfect choice, it is clean that it does not generate carbon emission or polluted waste constantly, it is also safe in most cases and it is cheap as well. However, nuclear is not perfect that once there is an accident that happens to a nuclear power station, its danger is hard to be contained; meanwhile, the nuclear waste is another issue that it is hard to find a way to store nuclear waste that does not damage the environment. Sustainable clean energy, such as solar, wind, is clean and safe, but very costly. Firstly, many of these types of sustainable clean energy are constrained by the environment. For example, for countries where do not have sufficient day time, solar power is not an ideal source of energy. Meanwhile, although a sustainable energy station sounds fantastic that once it is built, people do not need to worry any more, running a sustainable energy station is very costly and could require a large amount of resources, including human capital and natural resources that are used to build and replace the machinery in the station, such as steel and copper.

These three sources of energy can only meet maximum two of the three goals. The reason for fossil fuel is still the main source of energy is that fossil fuel is the one among the three that almost perfectly achieves two out of three goals while the other two sources are imperfect and do not meet the requirement of people’s energy usage as well as fossil fuel. The issue of nuclear power is it needs to be more controllable and the issue of sustainable clean energy is its cost. As long as these problems do not solve, the best choice of energy would still be fossil fuel though it is very harmful for our environment.