One Billion Tons of Coal

All of my life I have been interested in how energy is produced. For the last 28 years that interest has turned into serious worry.
The DuPont Magazine “Context”, Spring 1979, had a picture with the following caption “Shown above are loaded coal hopper cars awaiting shipment. This can give some idea of America’s energy appetite when you consider that coal is our least important fuel (18%)”. Coal is now 23%, and sure to rise further. The picture shows, what may be as many as 100 railroad sidings, a half mile or so long, teeming with coal hopper cars, (just a portion of more than one billion tons of coal that were burned that year in the United States). My concern was only about the air pollution that would come from burning so much coal. We knew that coal burning effluents contained nitric and sulfuric oxides; radioactive radon, thorium and U-235; soot; organic carcinogens, etc. which are positively dangerous to our health. Today however, we know of the even more serious danger of the otherwise benign, CO2 discharge, and the Global Warming that it might help to cause.
This leads to my primary worry about energy; only nuclear plants deliver massive quantities of clean, non-greenhouse gas energy, that can compete with, and replace, fossil fuels. One pound of nuclear fuel produces the same energy as 200,000 pounds of coal. Wind energy is alright, but it cannot solve the greenhouse problem, unless hundreds of thousands of turbines, better yet, millions of them, are built. Unless that is what we shoot for, wind energy will only divert attention from the real solution.
(100 nuclear plants produce 8Q of energy per year; 1.2 billion tons of coal produce about 24Q, three times as much; 2000 tons of uranium fuel in the 100 nukes, produce as much energy as 400,000,000 tons of coal; one ton of Uranium fuel produces as much as 200,000 tons of coal; one pound of Uranium fuel equals 200,000 pounds of coal.)