Nuke Power as a cure for Global Warming???
Well
that headline has to sit gently in the hearts of most rabid Environmentalists now doesn't it...
This is the result of an extensive study from MIT (a link to it is here) which says basically that the end-to-end costs to operate a reactor are higher than for conventional fuels but if we start doing silly things like regulating CO2 output, then the costs might be very similar. (Hat tip to Mysanthropyst)
When I said end-to-end, I meant taking care of the environmental issues of mining all the way through to core decommissioning and spent fuel reprocessing and disposal.
On my own personal note, the only real gripe I have about Nuclear energy is that each and every plant in the US is a different design. Some of them use similar components but the overall layout and configuration of each plant is different.
The US Navy and several other nations nuclear plants use a different model. They have a small collection of plants of varying sizes and if they need twice the power, they just build two plants. There is a very strong engineering benefit. If I worked at a plant and was having a problem with a specific pump leaking a little bit, I would call it in. If that same pump had a problem of small leaks at other sites, the entire series of pump would be re-engineered and replaced with a better design. This is called failure-mode analysis and works great for keeping surprises down to a minimum.
The waste is an issue - the stuff is long lived and deadly but, it is also very very small compared to the toxic stack waste from a commercial coal-burning electrical plant, even an efficient one. We are talking differences in volume of more than a million to one.
You will have long-lived radioactive waste to deal with but it will be relatively small quantities. The majority of stuff that we are having to find a home for today is all the junk left over from the Manhattan Project, not the 30-years accumulation of power plant waste.
Something to consider...
Posted by DaveH at January 12, 2004 7:54 PM