Energy Plot 3 - Natural Gas and Nuclear

I'll cover two nonrenewable energies in this post, just so this topic doesn't take forever.

Starting with natural gas.
Natural gas is actually a lot cleaner to burn than oil or coal. And it's often found right near wells of oil, where they're drilling already.
The problem is, it's much less profitable for drillers to mine the gas, so they usually just end up burning it off, which is a waste of an energy source, and a completely unnecessary source of pollution.
Like the other fossil fuels we've discussed so far, a lot of the easy deposits have been mined already. So now we're down to very destructive means of mining - like fraking. Fraking takes high-pressured water mixed with chemicals and sand and blasts it underground to break apart the rock. That lets the gas free so it can be gathered. But this is terrible for the water system, because it pollutes the groundwater with chemicals and gas. In some places, people's tap water can actually catch on fire because of the contamination of gas.

Nuclear
Actually, in the direct forming of energy, no real pollution is produced by this process.
If only it were that simple.
Nuclear energy comes from messing with atoms. And these atoms are fairly rare and hard to find. They need to be mined and there's not really any way to make more of it, just like fossil fuels (though nuclear isn't a fossil fuel). Mining these elements is just as destructive and polluting as mining anything else.
And of course, there's always the terror of a nuclear meltdown.
No matter how safe they make the power plant, there will always be a risk. You can't eliminate every factor that could cause problems (like what happened in Japan). So, for obvious reasons, no one wants a nuclear power plant anywhere near where they live.
Another massive problems is nuclear waste. While the actual production of nuclear energy is pretty clean, after the reactions are done, we're left with dangerous nuclear waste. This nasty stuff can last for hundreds and, yes, thousands of years. As far as we are all concerned, that stuff will never go away. So, they try to store it in out of the way tanks. But will those tanks really last thousands of years? Eventually they'll leak, and that waste could easily leach into the ground water. And if the containers are buried underground, these leaks won't be easily noticed.


After this, we go onto the pros and cons of renewable energy.