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Nuclear Energy -- a viable option?

This was written over ten years ago but it's a good entry-level intro to what is available now for Nuclear Energy and why we might want to consider moving more to it than more expensive options. The earlier plants (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, etc...) all suffered from the major design problem that each reactor was unique. The US Navy, France and Japan have opted for standardized plants, if you need twice the energy, use two cores... The advantage here is that if there is a problem with a specific pump, all the pumps for that design get replaced -- no quibbles -- problem solved. Take a look - absolutely zero CO2 emissions, the waste needs to be cared for for a while but it is minimal in volume compared with coal fly ash which remains toxic forever and occupies huge landfills near power plants. The earlier plant problems have been minimized with new designs that simple go out of criticality when the core heats up too much. Tried and true. Did I mention Zero CO2 emissions yet? Here is one excerpt talking about Nuclear Waste versus Coal Plant Waste:

A FIRST PERSPECTIVE
What is this material that is so controversial? As we know from elementary physical science courses, matter can be neither created nor destroyed. When fuel is burned to liberate energy, the fuel doesn't simply disappear. It is converted into another form, which we refer to as "waste." This is true whether we burn uranium or coal or anything else. For nuclear fuels, this residue, called "high-level waste," has been the principal source of concern to the public. As an initial perspective, it is interesting to compare nuclear waste with the analogous waste from a single large coal-burning power plant. The largest component of the coal-burning waste is carbon dioxide gas, produced at a rate of 500 pounds every second, 15 tons every minute. It is not a particularly dangerous gas, but it is the principal contributor to the "greenhouse effect" discussed at some length in Chapter 3. The other wastes from coal burning were also discussed in Chapter 3, but let's review them briefly. First and probably foremost is sulfur dioxide, the principal cause of acid rain and perhaps the main source of air pollution's health effects, released at a rate of a ton every 5 minutes. Then there are nitrogen oxides, the second leading cause of acid rain and perhaps also of air pollution. Nitrogen oxides are best known as the principal pollutant from automobiles and are the reason why cars need expensive pollution control equipment which requires them to use lead-free gasoline; a single large coal-burning plant emits as much nitrogen oxide as 200,000 automobiles. The third major coal burning waste is particulates including smoke, another important culprit in the negative health effects of air pollution. Particulates are released at a rate of several pounds per second. And next comes the ash, the solid material produced at a rate of 1,000 pounds per minute, which is left behind to cause serious environmental problems and long-term damage to our health. Coal-burning plants also emit thousands of different organic compounds, many of which are known carcinogens. Each plant releases enough of these compounds to cause two or three cancer deaths per year. And then there are heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and many others that are known or suspected of causing cancer, plus a myriad of other health impacts. Finally there is uranium, thorium, and radium, radioactive wastes released from coal burning that serve as a source of radon gas. The impact of this radioactive radon gas from coal burning on the public's health far exceeds the effects of all the radioactive waste released from nuclear plants (see Chapter 12). The waste produced from a nuclear plant is different from coal-burning wastes in two very spectacular ways. The first is in the quantities involved: the nuclear waste is 5 million times smaller by weight and billions of times smaller by volume. The nuclear waste from 1 year of operation weighs about 1½ tons and would occupy a volume of half a cubic yard, which means that it would fit under an ordinary card table with room to spare. Since the quantity is so small, it can be handled with a care and sophistication that is completely out of the question for the millions of tons of waste spewed out annually from our analogous coal-burning plant. The second pronounced difference is that the nuclear wastes are radioactive, providing a health threat by the radiation they emit, whereas the principal dangers to health from coal wastes arise from their chemical activity. This does not mean that the nuclear wastes are more hazardous; on nearly any comparison basis the opposite is true...

Lots of nice footnotes and appendices to go through and read. Posted by DaveH at February 28, 2005 11:56 PM | TrackBack