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Environmental Issues Associated with Energy Production and Use

Energy sources can be classified into two broad categories: traditional fossil fuels; conventional energy alternatives; and renewable energy. Fossil fuels include such sources as coal, natural gas, and oil, whereas renewable energy sources include solar and wind. Nuclear power, hydroelectric power, and bioenergy all fall under the conventional energy alternative category. Every energy source, whether renewable or fossil fuels, affects the environment in various ways. With this in mind, the current paper looks at the environmental issues associated with the generation of energy from coal, nuclear power, and wind.  

Coal

Coal – one of the most common and important fossil fuels – is a combustible brown or black sedimentary rock that contains high amounts of carbon and hydrocarbons. It contains energy deposits from plants that existed hundreds of millions ago. Being a fuel, coal is primarily used to generate electric power in coal-fired power plants, where lignite coal, bituminous coal, or subbituminous coal is burned. The combustion process produces heat which converts water into steam that drives a turbine, thereby generating electricity (USGS, 2017).

The fact that coal takes hundreds of millions of years to form means that it is a nonrenewable energy source (The U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2020a). Combustion of coal in electric power plants is a major source of GHG and CO₂ emissions and thus contributes negatively to environmental preservation efforts. Moreover, mining coal releases large amounts of dust particles which cause air pollution; it also disrupts landforms, such as water tables, and changes land-use patterns, which in turn affect different ecosystems.

Some environmental conservation strategies around the use of coal in energy generation include passing combustion gases from coal-fired power plants through flue gas desulfurization (scrubbers) to remove SO₂, NO_X, and other pollutants before the smoke is released into the atmosphere. Recent environmental laws have also spurred the development of “clean coal” and other advanced technologies to further reduce the environmental impacts (harmful emissions) of coal plants as well as enhance their efficiency (The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2020).

Various environmental policies have been developed to prevent or at least mitigate the environmental impacts of coal mining and its use in energy generation. For instance, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other environmental laws enacted under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan require coal-burning industries to reduce the pollutants they release into the air and water (The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2020; U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2020b).

Nuclear Power

Nuclear power is the generation of electricity using heat produced during nuclear fission (the splitting of uranium atoms) or nuclear decay reactions in a nuclear reactor. Nuclear fission reactions release nuclear energy that produces heat, which is then used to heat water to generate steam (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2019). The steam spins a large turbine to generate electricity (Office of Nuclear Energy, 2020).

Nuclear power offers a cleaner way of producing steam in power plants to generate electricity, meaning it has lesser impacts on the environment. Notably, the generation process does not produce combustion byproducts and greenhouse gases since the process does not require the burning of fuels. However, the major environmental concern around nuclear power is the proper handling, storage, and disposal of radioactive waste especially spent reactor fuel and uranium mill tailings. Nuclear power also contributes indirectly to CO₂ and other flue gas emissions during the making and transportation of reactor fuel and mining and processing of uranium ore. In response, special regulations have been established, and are being enforced, by various agencies including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (Berger, 2008) to govern the production, transportation, handling, storage, and disposal of both raw materials (uranium) and byproducts (radioactive waste) in order to protect both the environment and human health (Pigott et al., 2020).