When thinking about which countries in the world pollute the most, countries like China, India and the United States come immediately to mind. However, one of the biggest polluters in the world has somehow kind of went under the radar, as it's not widely recognized by the general public.
Namely, Australia.
Do you know how many nuclear power plants there are in Australia? Not a single one. In fact, for example Queensland officially banned nuclear power in 2007. The rest of the country hasn't been much more nuclear power friendly either
So, if there are no nuclear power plants, where are they getting all their electricity? Perhaps solar power? After all, Australia is a like a huge desert. Nope, about 1% of all energy production is solar power. Commendable, but still just a tiny fraction. Wind power is better at about 4%. Hydroelectrical power accounts for about 7%.
Those and the rest of the renewable energy power sources account for a sizeable chunk of all energy production, but still well less than half of all of it.
So what does power the majority of Australia's electricity production?
Its 24 coal power plants, of course. That's what.
You know, because coal power is so much cleaner and safer than nuclear power.
In fact, Australia is one of the biggest producers of coal in the world, not only mining it for its own use but also exporting it to other countries. Thus, Australia is not only one of the biggest polluters in the world by burning the coal themselves, but they also sell enormous amounts of it to other countries to burn.
The funny thing is that Australia also has rich uranium mines. The funnier thing is that Australia does mine uranium and exports it to other countries at hefty prices. They just don't use it themselves.
Not only is this highly hypocritical, but in fact they are missing on an absolute dream opportunity. Not only is nuclear power one of the cleanest power sources in existence (even when accounting for the pollution caused by mining nuclear fuel), and proportionally to the amount of produced energy it's the cleanest source by a large margin, but moreover if the country itself has rich sources of nuclear fuel it would also be one of the cheapest forms of power production because they can mine their own fuel. They don't need to buy it from other countries at hefty prices.
Indeed, currently Australia has some of the highest electricity prices in the world (yet they still suffer from blackouts). If they replaced all 24 coal power plants with about 4 or 5 nuclear power plants, which would produce the same amount of energy and even more, it would probably become some of the cheapest electricity in the world because they can mine their own nuclear fuel.
As a bonus, the CO2 emissions and other pollutants of Australia would drop to a fraction of what it is now.
But nooooo... Nuclear power is so scary. Just keep burning that coal, because it's so much safer.
They want to fight against climate change, yet they just keep doing this shit. They would have the perfect solution, but no, it's too scary. Better keep that coal burning. Idiots.
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