“In the 1970s, oil spills from tankers — container ships transporting oil — were common.” Typically, “between 70 and 100 spills occurred per year. That’s one or two spills every week. This number has fallen by more than 90% since then. In the last decade, no year has had more than eight oil spills, as shown in the chart. The quantity of oil spilled from tankers has also fallen dramatically. Over the last decade, the average is less than 10,000 tonnes per year, compared to over 300,000 tonnes in the 1970s,” notes Our World in Data.
That’s a decline of more than 97% in the amount of spilled oil. In 1973, there were 117 medium or large oil spills, including 27 spills that were larger than 700 tons. By 2022, there were only 7 medium or large oil spills, including 3 that were larger than 700 tons.
Nuclear power results in less waste and less air and water pollution than oil. A recent study found that nuclear power is best for the environment. Yet green activists in places like Germany have still forced the closure of nuclear power plants. And they have done so even though “every major study, including a recent one by the British medical journal Lancet, finds the same thing: nuclear is the safest way to make reliable electricity,” says a long-time environment activist. “Solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste,” such as “dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.” Unlike wind farms, nuclear power plants don’t kill birds. And “wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants.” “Nuclear power is the safest form of energy we have, if you consider deaths per megawatt of energy produced,” notes Yale University professor Steven Novella.
Nuclear plants generate most electric power in countries like France and Slovakia, but in the U.S., nuclear power plants provide only about 18% of all power. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission makes it very expensive to construct a nuclear plant — even the application process is incredibly expensive and usually takes years of unnecessary delay. Even when nuclear plants are already operating safely and providing badly needed power, anti-nuclear activists sometimes get government officials to shut them down. Recently, however, the NRC approved the construction of a nuclear plant with an innovative design and a non-water cooled reactor.
