UK's Chief Scientist Backs Nuclear Power Revival

Timbotronic writes "The UK government's chief scientific adviser has sent his clearest signal that Britain will need to revive its nuclear power industry in the face of a looming energy crisis and the threat of global warming. In an interview with the Guardian, Sir David King said there were economic as well as environmental reasons for a new generation of reactors." From the article: "His remarks come in the build-up to international talks in Montreal on how to address the threat of climate change when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012. He denied suggestions - sparked by comments from Mr Blair that he was changing his mind on whether international treaties were the best way to tackle global warming - that Britain was moving closer to the stance of the US, which has refused to back Kyoto-style emission reductions."

Comments

Re:Nuclear Power

[Phanatic1a]

How much nuclear fuel is on earth. If we replaced all the fossil fuels we use, with nuclear fuel, how long would our supplies last?

There's about 50 years of uranium reserves right now, a bit over 2 million tons.

Reserves are ores that are economically exploitable. In other words, reserves increase when you find a less expensive way to get the ore, or when the price of ore rises. If the price of ore goes up by 50%, we more than double our reserves to 5 million tons. If it goes up much more than that, oceanic reserves come into play, and there are 4.5 *billion* tons in the oceans.

Now, that's talking about U235 burned in a PWR. There are other things you can do which vastly increase reserves. There are reactor designs that can breed U238 into U235. That presents a proliferation concern, but you can also just burn U238 in a CANDU reactor or other design. You can breed thorium into U233 and burn that.

And the thing is that nuclear fuel is so much more energy-dense than chemical fuel. Coal has an energy content of about 24 MJ per kilogram, assuming perfect conversion to electricity, and I think good coal plants with top-of-the-line turbines and boilers and everything can get up to about 70% overall thermal efficiency, but hell, let's say 90%. Figures I found for the US in 1982 indicate that all the nuclear power plants in the US consumed 540 tons of fuel and produced 1.1E12 kilowatt-hours of electricity, which means *after* all those efficiency losses (PWRs are less thermally efficient because you've got to transfer heat across coolant loops), we were getting 8 million megajoules per kilogram of fuel.

8 million megajoules per kilogram, versus 21.6 megajoules per kilogram. What that means is that your *fuel* cost can rise significantly, but your cost per kilowatt-hour at your meter will see only a very small rise.

So to sum up, there's a hella lot of nuclear fuel available.

Re:Not-In-My-Backyard Syndrome

[HanzoSpam]

Modern reactors are far safer than their more temperamental counterparts of the 70s and 80s (Chernobyl? Three Mile Island?).

It's ridiculous to even mention Chernobyl and Three Mile Island in the same breath. What people seem to ignore is that the reactor at TMI functioned exactly as designed in the event of a meltdown - it shut itself down. I'd also point out that Three Mile Island is still in operation. Only one reactor was affected. The rest of the facility has been humming along quite nicely ever since.

Three Mile Island isn't an example of how dangerous nuclear technology is, it's an example of how safe it is.