That’s a question for the ages, isn’t it? All this talk now about nuclear power being great and then again, nuclear power being not so great. Is it a green technology or a spawn of Satan? Is it a world beating new age way to make friendly power, or a dangerous source of energy production that needs to be closed up and shut down. How about if we take a closer look at what this hub-bub about nuclear power is all about?
Back in those wacky and wonderful days of the ‘50’s, when cars were big and egos were bigger, nuclear power was touted as the new wave in energy production. It was considered extremely safe, easy to manage and reliable. In fact, by 1954 before a single nuclear plant was built, it began to look as if nuclear power was so amazingly good, that electricity might even become too cheap to meter. How’s that for a concept!
So, back then when the economy was booming, money was everywhere, and new ideas were tried just because, well, just because they were new ideas, nuclear power plants began to get built. Better still, they began to produce electricity. At first, everything started to look like nuclear power was exactly as it had been predicted; cheap and clean power. And truthfully, it really is cheap and a clean source power overall. However, what no one foresaw in the beginning was the ultimate bugaboo with nuclear power, and that is nuclear waste.
Estimates say that nuclear waste will take 3 million years to become non radioactive, which is a pretty daunting statistic. 3 million years ago, humans were just about crawling out of the swamps, and 3 million years from now, we might be crawling back in them. Just on the face of it, everyone should be able to see a problem here with getting rid of this stuff. But, what can be done about this? Nuclear waste is a fact of life with a nuclear reactor, there’s no way around it, and larger nuclear reactors produce about 3 tons of waste per year!
That factor, right there, plus higher construction costs incorporating more and more safety regulations, and the 3 Mile Island disaster, essentially killed the nuclear power movement. Suddenly, nuclear power was a white elephant with no foreseeable future in the US.
In all actuality, the waste issue by itself bedevils the industry as a whole. Stored nuclear waste must either be buried somewhere in unleakable containers for 3 million years, or it must be reprocessed. Reprocessing can be done in many ways, which is the best solution to ridding the planet of this problem, but in an age when money talks, it isn’t cost effective to reprocess nuclear waste.
So, how green is nuclear energy? The power generated is created by zero emissions, which is the darling phrase of the green movement. It’s simple, really. Nuclear rods heat water and turn it into steam which drives generators sending massive currents of electricity into the lines. That’s it, and right there you can see how in the early 50’s, this really looked like a great idea. Find a source of cold water, any river or large lake will do, and you have free power. As it was said, electricity too cheap to meter. That’s the nuclear power fantasy.
The reality is, what to do about the waste. To bury it means making containers that last, potentially, millions of years, which is virtually impossible. Reprocessing means turning waste back into usable rods that can power the reactors, which is a good idea. However, since that is not cost effective, no one really wants to do it, and if it is done, suddenly nuclear power becomes more expensive than conventional ways to produce electricity. That’s a no win situation.
There is no doubt that at some point nuclear power, even with all of it’s safety and waste issues, will become the green power that has always been expected of it. The problem is, do we just want to scrap this white elephant and lead it out to pasture, or pour billions upon billions of dollars into making it a viable alternative for electrical power generation with no guarantees, while we have solar, wind, hydrogen and batteries which are cleaner, safer and ready to go right now. And that’s a question for the ages.
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There are other fuel technologies available that make the waste stable for the long term without processing or complicated storage containers (e.g. the pebble bed modular reactor, PBMR, uses an innovative design – co-op funding from the US for this project, out of South Africa, was killed by the Bush Administration – strange, eh?)
The industry itself is often times its own worst enemy by maintaining the status quo and keeping new and innovative technology down.
Notwithstanding that, there are places where we could store the most common types of nuclear waste using current technologies.
How do I know?
I work in nuclear waste management.
(This might make me a bit biased, of course – but if you’re not getting your information from someone who works in that area, you’re not getting the whole story. Wikipedia does not count…)
It appears that the ’status quo’ of nearly every industry, as you call it, keeps a lot of new technology down.
Light bulbs could be made to burn 100 years, but that’s counter productive in a business where a disposable lightbulb advances sales. There used to be research into a gadget called a 100 mile per gallon carburetor, but that wouldn’t be good for the gasoline business. Hi-Def TV was invented in the early 80’s, but sponsors wouldn’t pay more to have commercials broadcast in Hi-Def, so that technology was shunned by the industry. (The only reason we have Hi-Def now is that SONY, the inventor, began INCLUDING Hi-Def comp chips in their standard broadcast cameras in the late 1990’s.)
So I agree with you, and until businesses realize that new and different technology which changes the status quo is good, it will be much of the same old-same old.
Thanks for the comment, I much appreciate it!
The world will end because of nuclear activity. Stop it now…
There’s nothing wrong with nuclear itself. It’s that rogue countries that want to build nuclear weapons pass off building nuclear facilities for productivity as an excuse.