One Word: Energy (Editorial)

Vernon “Buddy” Hasten, president and CEO of the Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas, is urging us to face facts (see Kyle Massey’s energy column here). It wouldn’t hurt to listen to him.

“Look, the most affordable power system in the world is probably not very reliable,” he said. “We have to be realistic. The sun goes down every night.”

Hasten is excited about the possibility of small modular nuclear reactors becoming part of a mix of energy sources to power our world. A 20-year nuclear submariner in the U.S. Navy, he knows something about nuclear power’s capacity, limitations and, yes, hazards.

“If America wants to be serious about net zero carbon, and we don’t want to go back to fanning each other in summer, we have to have something energy-dense. There’s coal and gas. Years ago, there was wood. But the only thing the world knows today that could do the job emissions-free is nuclear,” Hasten said.

Plentiful, powerful, relatively inexpensive energy is the foundation of a functioning economy, of prosperity, of a life that is not a constant misery.

Energy costs, partially driven by pandemic-charged consumer demand and the war in Ukraine, are fueling the inflation bedeviling the United States. And that war continually demonstrates to us why relying on one source for much of our energy, as Europe does on Russia, makes nations, their people and their economies vulnerable to the actions of one rogue country.

If the United States is to continue to prosper, we must work to make ourselves as energy independent as possible. And that is likely to require, at least for some years, a mix of power sources: fossil fuels, solar, wind, nuclear and whatever our clever, wily species is likely to next devise. But we must consider expanding nuclear energy as a power source.