Here's a quick quiz for you: what holiday season tradition is the #1 contributor to the ongoing climate crisis?

That's right, it's Santa Claus. No, not because of the toy production facilities, nor the aerial delivery—those went electric years ago—but rather due to one stubborn custom: the ol’ lump of coal.

Coal is, in technical terms, the absolute worst. It's responsible for more CO₂ emissions than any other fuel on Earth, and now that Father Christmas has got over two billion tykes to visit—most of whom aren't exactly angels—it's pretty clear that this bituminous punishment isn't sustainable.

The most obvious solution, of course, would be to raise all children with such love, wisdom, respect, and kindness that they end up suffuse with fellow feeling, and behave benevolently in every scenario; with no one on the naughty list, there would be no need to schlep around those sooty sacks. But I am no fool; that is plainly impossible. Instead, we will have to content ourselves with the second-best option: 100 microgram pellets of enriched uranium.

The advantages are multifold. First and foremost, burning less coal means fewer toxic byproducts, such as greenhouse gases, sulfurous compounds (which cause acid rain), and heavy metals. Secondly, the logistics would be simpler and more efficient. All that coal takes up a lot of space (don't be duped by this notion of "Santa's magic sack"—there are firm physical limits in this universe, and no quantity of "yuletide spirit" will allow one to circumvent them); the uranium pellets could be stored much more compactly, reducing round trips to the North Pole for delivery. Finally, there are educational benefits—it doesn't take a child prodigy to figure out how to get heat from coal, but extracting useful energy from fissile uranium (without going supercritical) is an enriching DIY activity for the whole family.

But where is Santa going to get his hands on all of that yellowcake, you ask? Luckily for him, the world's largest uranium mine, McArthur River, is in northern Saskatchewan¹—just a hop, skip, and a jump from Kris Kringle's home base (especially if he retrofits the sleigh with a small nuclear reactor).

Only one question remains: why 100 micrograms? It's simple. I figure that a pretty generous lump of coal would be about the size of my fist.² A basic Archimedean exercise in the kitchen sink revealed that my fist displaces about 320g of water, so call it 320 cm³. The density of coal is 1.05 g/cm³,³ and the energy density of coal is 24 megajoules per kilogram.⁴ Multiply those out (don't forget to convert grams to kilograms!), and you get roughly 8 megajoules of energy in a typical Christmas morning disappointment. Divide that 8 MJ by the energy density of uranium (76,000,000 MJ/kg⁵) to get the final result of ~100 µg—WolframAlpha tells me that would translate to a 110 µm sphere of uranium.

I hope you'll support me in switching to uranium so that we might have a greener Christmas. And by that, I don't just mean "more eco-friendly"—it does wonders in glassware too.

It won't be easy, but with a CANDU attitude, we'll get it done. Happy New Year.