Article Review Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 2

Article Review - Essay Example On the other hand, both coal and nuclear have little or no energy storage needs and both have been thoroughly analysed in a cost analysis to promote further interest by the business community to build more plants of both types. The authors grant that both these sources come with tremendous environmental impact, and in fact refer to them as ‘environmental delinquents,’ but they purport that they both are essential ‘wedges’ in the power capacity production of the world. However the tremendous amount of carbon emissions produced by coal energy and the problem of nuclear waste storage and the high cost to produce nuclear energy are daunting problems for these resources. Coal itself produces the lion share of energy for the planet. Its use is expected to rise 73% by the year 2030, due primarily to the economic emergence of both India and China. If this scenario is true than greenhouse gases are also projected to increase by 56% within the same time frame. The authors point out that the ‘good news’ is that there are alternatives to reduce these carbon emissions by sequestering the gasses in large underground chambers. However the technology and lack of fail-safe protocols are counter productive to implementing this technology. There is also the process of Coal gassification, which separates out the various gasses from raw coal and makes the sequestering of Carbon Dioxide a more simplified process. A by-product of this would also create hydrogen gas that can be burned and also used as fuel. They also site the continued abundance of fossil fuels as a source for energy far into the future. While research continues in to the area of Clean Co al plants, most researchers admit that it is an impossible pipe dream. Nuclear energy, on the other hand, has had its bout of black-eyes such as the Cernoble and Three-Mile Island disasters. The authors admit this was very bad press for production of more nuclear