Our Generation’s 3-Mile Island.

This morning I was reading about the tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. You would have to be living under a rock in order to miss this story in the news as it has been going on for the past month. Most recently, BP’s '”top kill” method has unfortunately failed to seal the leak and stop the flow of oil.

As I read the story I realized that we are living our generation’s equivalent of the Three Mile Island disaster. For those of you who are not familiar, the Three Mile Island disaster involved a nuclear power plant located near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that in 1979, released a significant amount of radiation into the environment. Since this accident, there has not been a single approval or construction of a new nuclear power plant in the United States. During the same time period, other countries have turned to nuclear power as their major source of clean energy production (like France – 78% of electricity from nuclear).

I am willing to believe that history will repeat its self here in the aftermath of the Deep Water Horizon accident and spill. We will likely be very reluctant to grant any more licenses to drill new oil wells within the United States, and more cumbersome regulation will occur for those wells that already exist. From here on it may also be the turning point where some other countries will begin to lead the way in safe extraction and utilization of oil as a resource while we sit on the resources beneath our feet leaving them and unused.

Though the spill in the Gulf is a terrible tragedy, I do not believe that our course should involve quitting the extraction of oil in the same cold-turkey fashion as use of nuclear power. I can imagine that eons ago, the caveman who first discovered fire probably burned him self, maybe his friends/family… perhaps even burned down his house, neighborhood or forest! But did not stop man from working with fire. If we stopped, we could still be living in caves today. We figured it out despite the risks and occasional accidents involved. We were better off for it.