Tuesday night at the Collins Executive Education Building’s Crum Auditorium, renowned scientist Rodney Ewing presented a lecture on nuclear energy titled “Nuclear Energy Issues: Plutonium vs. Carbon.” Ewing, a professor at the University of Michigan, has received many honors during his career, including a fellow of the Geological Society of America and the Mineralogical Society of America. He spoke as a Department of Geological Sciences Hamilton Visiting Scholar.

Since global warming is a hot topic in the United States, scientists have been searching for alternate methods of obtaining energy. The country currently relies on carbon, which causes the greenhouse effect. To solve the problem, many people have supported finding a nuclear solution. However, Ewing argues that a switch from the carbon cycle to the nuclear cycle all depends on one question: “Which problem do you want to have? Do you want to deal with carbon or plutonium?” While both methods have their pros and cons, Ewing focused on the nuclear cycle.

The top three issues of the nuclear fuel cycle entail the type of fuel cycle, waste disposal, and diversion and proliferation of nuclear material. First, the country could adopt either an open or closed fuel cycle. With a closed fuel cycle, some of the waste can be recycled; open fuel cycles would require a way to safely store the material for a long period of time. This first dilemma leads to the second: waste disposal. Yucca Mountain in Nevada is a proposed repository site, but, according to Ewing, “every year, you would need a repository like Yucca Mountain” for storage. The third issue: proliferation entails the growing amount of plutonium worldwide. A mistake in handling it could result in severe and numerous casualties.

Nuclear power is a topic people will discuss far into the future. Ewing noted that “you need a lot of skills … for this field [that] are not common in undergraduate and even graduate students. And jobs make [the focus] even narrower.” Therefore, anyone interested in solving the world’s energy problems should keep an open mind.