Should The US Build More Nuclear Power Plants for an Energy Source?

Nuclear energy is one of the most reliable sources of energy in the world today with many nations adopting it due to the relatively low cost of energy that comes after the initial cost of constructing power plants. The United States should therefore invest more in the construction of more nuclear power plants because whether we like it or not, nuclear energy is the energy source of the future. If more power plants are constructed, then the reliability on the other conventional sources of energy, such as fossil fuels, would be greatly reduced.

When more nuclear power plants are constructed in the United States, they should be constructed in secluded areas to ensure the safety of the human population in case of a nuclear accident as happened at Chernobyl. Furthermore, safe ways for the disposal of nuclear waste should be devised so that no harm can be brought to people who come into contact with it and to the environment. Since the construction of more nuclear power plants depends on the goodwill of all the political groups involved, then it is advisable for all these parties to come to a consensus on how to best deal with the issue. The nuclear plants should be constructed and while this is being done, all the safety concerns of those who are skeptical about it should be addressed to ensure that all the parties are working together to create a safe and efficient source of energy. There are many advantages for the use of nuclear energy in the United States and these may be political, economic, and environmental among others.

There are many economic benefits for the construction of nuclear power plants in the United States as a source of energy. One of these benefits is that very small amounts of raw materials are required for the production of a large amount of nuclear energy. Moreover, since these raw materials are required in such small quantities, they can be easily transported from one place to another even globally. The operation of nuclear power stations at their full capacity will ensure that cheap electricity is available in the market and that more people will be able to afford it. Nuclear power is a reliable source of energy because the average lifespan of a nuclear reactor is forty years and this lifespan can be extended by another twenty years. Although the initial cost of constructing a nuclear plant is high, the cost of running it afterwards is relatively low and this makes it a very good investment.

Nuclear power is very environmentally friendly because no harmful emissions are released into the environment during the process of producing energy, as compared to other sources of energy such as fossil fuels. Nuclear plants require very little space to construct and because of this it has very little impact on the environment. It can be used to produce large amounts of energy at very little environmental cost compared to other sources of energy because nothing needs to be burned in order to produce energy. Throughout the nuclear fuel cycle, all the byproducts produced are accounted for and it is carefully stored to ensure that there are no adverse impacts on the environment. It has been said of nuclear energy that since the beginning of the industrial revolution, it is the only industry which has managed to account for all of its waste that has a potential to harm the environment.

The use of nuclear energy may also have a political impact on the United States especially at the international level. In the recent decades, the United States has, on numerous occasions, had to go to war in other countries to secure its energy interests. A very good example of this has been the First and the Second Gulf Wars whose main purpose was to secure the supply of oil. The use of nuclear energy would greatly reduce the dependence of the United States on foreign sources of energy because it would have more than enough for its domestic needs and it would even be able to export some of the surplus electricity to neighboring countries. Furthermore, the image of the United States as an aggressive nation on the world stage would be rehabilitated and there would be a return of goodwill towards it which its recent wars have tarnished. 

In conclusion, the construction of more nuclear power plants is inevitable because nuclear energy is currently the most viable energy source in the world. If it is managed well, then it has the potential of producing enough energy to satisfy all the energy needs of the United States with minimal harm to the environment. Moreover, the low cost of running a nuclear power plant after the initial high cost of construction, makes it a very cost effective source of energy and due to the long lifespan of a nuclear reactor, then a lot of money would be saved. The political goodwill that the United States had lost would be returned through its use of nuclear energy and this would secure it position as the world leader.

Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg was born on January 28, 1929 in Stockholm, Sweden to a Swedish diplomat who was based in New York and he attended the Latin School of Chicago and afterwards went to Yale University where from 1946 to 1950, he studied literature and art history. He then returned to Chicago where he took classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago later, after moving to New York, he met and was influenced by such artists as Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Allan Kaprow. Starting 1969 to 1977, Oldenburg was in a relationship with the artist and sculptor, Hannah Wilke with whom he shared several studios and travelled together with and in 1977, he married Coosje Van Bruggen. Oldenburg’s first show was at the Judson Gallery of New York in 1959 and it included metaphorical drawings and papier - mache sculptures and in 1966, he was credited with an exhibition of his work at the Moderna Museet; in 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among several others. Oldenburg won the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1989, in 2000, he was awarded the National medal of Arts and he has also received honorary degrees from several universities in the United States and in Europe. His sculpture, named the Typewriter sculpted in 1976, and was one among an edition of three was sold was sold for $2.2 million at Christie’s New York in 2009. Oldenburg’s creativity can be traced to his childhood when he was often left to entertain himself with his father’s office machinery. He has always been fascinated by scale, and during the 1960s, he began enlarging everyday items, often imagining them the size of public monuments.

Oldenburg’s art reflects the popular culture of the 1960s when he and his associates began to use images associated with popular culture in their work.  In the early 1960s, Oldenburg helped to usher in the Pop Art revolution by using materials like burlap and canvas to create sandwiches and ice cream cones the size of furniture and everywhere he traveled, he replaced existing monuments with those of his own design. His non-heroic subjects challenged traditional concepts of public sculpture and the artist has envisioned a huge pair of scissors on the site of the Washington Monument, a giant fan to replace the Statue of Liberty, and two enormous toilet-tank floats installed on a river in the city of London. His work has concentrated more on environmental awareness and conservation. Oldenburg's installation The Street, exhibited twice in Greenwich Village in 1960, used banal, trash like materials to depict pedestrians, cars, street signs, and other elements of a New York City streetscape and as it turns out, the food sculptures are autobiographical. "The key to my work is that it's about my experience," said Mr. Oldenburg, 83, in an interview in Vienna some years ago, "If I ate BLTs, which I did, I would sooner or later want to create them".

Facts about the Theory of Demand

Demand is the economic theory that explains a consumer’s desire and readiness to pay a price for a precise good or service. Normally, the price of commodities and services increase as their demand dwindles while the price decreases when there is a high demand for them. According to Taylor and Weerapana (53), the term demand is a relationship between two economic variables namely: the price of a particular good; and the quantity of that good that consumers are willing to buy at the price during a specific time period. It describes how much of a good consumers will purchase at each price and it can be represented by a numerical table or by a graph. As the price of goods and services rise, the quantity demand by consumers goes down. Siddiqui (35) further describes demand as that effective desire which can be satisfied meaning that desires are simply imaginations. It is required that the demand commodity should be available at a certain place, time, and price. Demand must satisfy the following requirements; desire for the specific commodity; sufficient resources to purchase the desired commodity; willingness to spend the resources; and the availability of the commodity.

Demand can also be used to measure or predict the quantity of commodities and services which the buyers would be motivated to buy in a market at a given time and at a given place. The changes in the price of the commodities that are related to that which a consumer uses affects the market demand for it and an example of this would be the price of margarine (which the consumer does not normally use) is much lower than the price of butter (which the consumer normally uses). Inevitably, the consumer will decide to go for the cheaper product although their preference lies with the more expensive one. The demand for certain commodities may also be affected by the changes of the income of potential buyers, for example, if the income of a buyer is reduced, then he will opt to purchase cheaper commodities in line with his diminished income; but if the income is increased, then the buyer’s demand for the same product at higher prices will increase significantly. The future expectations of buyers almost always have a tendency of influencing the market demand of a product and this is usually displayed by considering the income security of potential buyers. If a potential buyer is confident in his belief that his future income will be stable, the he is more likely to spend more in buying both the commodities that he needs and wants. If however his future income is very insecure, then he is most likely to keep most of his money in savings in anticipation of a bleak financial future than spending it on commodities.

The demand schedule is a table that shows the quantity of demand of a good at the various price levels and it is a very important feature within the market because it helps to predict the future trends in the demand of commodities. In this way, given the price level, it is easy to determine the expected quantity demanded. A demand schedule is normally used alongside a supply schedule and these show the amount of certain goods that can be supplied to a market or markets at given price levels at various times and it is used to indicate that there is an inverse relationship between the price and the quantity demanded. Lipsey and Chrystal (40) state that a demand schedule is one way of showing the relationship between quantity demand and price. It is a numerical table that is used to show the quantity of goods that will be demanded at some selected prices.

Hoag and Hoag (59) state that the law of demand shows an inverse relationship between the price of a good and the quantity demanded of that good. When the value of a commodity goes in a certain direction, the amount of the equal commodity that is in demand goes in the opposite direction. As the price rises, less is purchased and this is indicated by the quantity demanded decreasing. There is a clear evidence of the law of demand at work in our daily lives. For example, when postage rates increase, then fewer Christmas cards are sent because the quantity demanded has fallen as the price has risen. When retail stores advertise sales, then these sales serve to increase the quantity demanded by lowering the price. The buyer response to higher fuel and energy prices will lead to smaller and more energy efficient cars, and in the homes, cooler temperatures and sweaters because there is a lower quantity demanded of energy at the higher price.

One reason why a consumer buys more of a good as the price falls is that the good becomes an attractive substitute for other goods and this encourages the consumer buys more of the good and consequently less of the other goods related to it. As the price of a good goes down, the consumer is able to purchase more of this good than he could before the price fell. Therefore, the consumer appears to have more income but this is not the case because it should be noted that the amount of money that the consumer actually has remains unchanged yet the purchasing power of the money increases as the price falls. The law of demand tells us that people have a tendency to respond to the price changes of given commodities and learning this would be helpful for a trader in fixing the prices of his commodities because he knows how much the demand for that particular commodity will fall if the price is raised beyond a certain level. The law of demand also helps the government in the setting of taxes on various commodities by analyzing the effects of taxes on the demand of these commodities in the market and adjusting the tax rates so that they may be more to the government’s advantage. It is also a very important factor in the planning of when and where to sell commodities due to their demand.

There are however some exceptions to the law of demand and an example of this is the inability of this law to explain why when the price of some goods increases, their demand also increase, and when their prices fall, then their demand decreases with this fall. A good example of such goods are precious stones and metals whose demand will continue to be high when their prices are high and the demand for them falls when their prices fall. A lot of people out of ignorance consider goods of cheaper prices to be of low quality and they buy it less, but when the prices of such commodities become high, then there is a tendency among these buyers to buy more of this commodity.

The law of demand further does not work when in anticipation for the rise of the price of goods; consumers begin to buy more of these goods even after there is an increase in the price of these goods in the present time. Similarly, if the prices are expected to fall in the foreseeable future, the consumers will buy less of these goods even if the costs of these commodities have become even lower in the present. Moreover, the law of demand does not work during the times of war or emergencies because if there are fears of a food shortage, then consumers will buy more food commodities for the purpose of hoarding and building stock. On the other hand, under certain situations, during an economic depression when prices are continuously falling, people tend to postpone their demand and thus buy less at lower prices.

In order to define marginal utility, we shall first define what utility is. Utility is the way defined by market participants of measuring gratification or contentment and how these relate to the decisions that people make while purchasing goods and it measures the advantages or disadvantages of consuming certain goods or services. Lipsey and Harbury (39) state that marginal utility is defined as the difference in utility arising from a change in the rate of consumption per period of time. Marginal utility is the added fulfillment that consumers gain from consuming additional units of commodities or services. It is an essential economic concept because the economists make use of it to determine how much of an item potential consumers will buy. The marginal utility is positive when the consumption of a bonus item increases the total utility while marginal utility is considered to be negative when the consumption of the bonus item decreases the total utility.

Mishra (20) defines the demand curve as the graphic illustration of a demand schedule depicting the relationship between the price of certain commodities and the amount of these commodities that buyers are able and willing to but at a given price. Demand curves are used to approximate the conducts in the market and these are often combined with supply curves to approximate the price at which sellers are willing to put up for sale the equivalent quantity of goods as buyers are willing to buy. The demand curve represents the highest quantities for every unit of time that consumers will take at various prices. The demand curve is used to show the relationships between the diverse quantities demanded at diverse prices.

There are various factors which affect the demand of commodities in the market and this is elaborated by Siddiqui (43) who states that an increase in the number of buyers will increase the demand for the good, for example, the demand for land increases as the population increases. An increase in the price of a commodity expected in future increases the demand in the present while a decrease in the same decreases the current demand. For example, when a good is temporarily put on sale, the people stock up on the good with the expectation that the good will no longer be in the market in the near future. Demand can shift due to the changes in taste over time, for example, the demand for breakfast cereal may possibly be very high in the morning but its demand may turn out to be very low at night. Furthermore, changes in quality also affect demand, for example, CDs cost more than cassettes because the music in CDs is of a higher quality than that in cassettes.

Siddiqui (52) states that elasticity of demand is a measure of the relative change in the amount purchased in response to any change in price or a given demand curve. Price elasticity deals with how sensitive the demand for a certain commodity is to a change in the products own price and in relation to this, there are several factors which determine the elasticity of a product or service and some of these include the following: the more the number of close substitutes for a good in the market, the more elastic is the demand for a product because consumers can more easily switch their demand if the price of one product changes relative to others in the market. Furthermore, there may be significant transaction costs involved in switching between different goods and services and in this case, demand tends to be inelastic, for example, cell phone service providers may decide to include fine sections in contracts or may insist on twelve month contracts being taken out. Goods and services that are considered by consumers to be necessities tend to have a more elastic demand because the said consumers can still survive without luxuries when their financial plans are stretched to their limits. Demand has a tendency to be more price elastic the longer consumers are allowed to respond to a price change by varying their purchasing decisions because it takes time for consumers to notice and to respond to price fluctuations.

References

Hoag, Arleen J & Hoag, John H. Introductory Economic. Singapore: World Scientific, 2006.

Lipsey, Richard G. Economics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Mishra, Sasmita. Engineering Economics and Costing. New Delhi, India: PHI Learning, 2009.

Siddiqui, S.A. Managerial Economics and Financial Analysis. New Delhi, India: New Age International, 2006.

Taylor, John B. & Weerapana, Akila. Economics. Andover, United Kingdom: Cengage Learning, 2007.