Conventional nuclear energy is known from past experience in the UK to be highly uneconomical, while the disposal of enormous amounts of hazardous radioactive wastes remain an intractable problem to this day. What is less well known is that the energy
returns of conventional nuclear power plants are not better than those of a gas-fired plant if low-grade uranium ore has to be mined and processed. Furthermore, a natural gas-fired heat and electricity co-generation power station is comparable to a nuclear power/natural gas plant in both energy yield and carbon emissions savings, but is
much cheaper to construct, and supplies heat and electricity more cheaply to the consumer. A biogas-powered co-generation plant is even better, and saves seven times the carbon emissions of a nuclear power/natural gas plant.
The new generation pebble bed nuclear reactor is said to be economical and safe, but the economy is contingent upon the assumption that it does not require the safety measures used in other types of reactor, and large doubts remain over that.

  1. Nuclear energy is extremely uneconomical, as the past performance of the nuclear industry in Britain has shown. The other major problem is safety. Once set up, a nuclear power nation must be maintained and monitored continuously to high standards. Reprocessing spent fuel is no easier. In June 2005, a leak of highly radioactive waste was discovered in the reprocessing plant at Sellafield containing enough uranium and plutonium to make several atomic weapons; and had gone unnoticed for more than eight months. Reprocessing spent fuel also leads to an exponential increase in the volume of hazardous radioactive wastes, and provides ideal opportunities for the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
  2. The potential of nuclear power is limited by the amount of sufficiently high-grade uranium ore available. At today’s rate, economically recoverable reserves of uranium, about 10 million tonnes, would last less than 100 years.
  3. Uranium extraction is an energy intensive and hazardous process. It has resulted in more than 6 billion tonnes of radioactive tailings of potent carcinogens. Once in the reactor the uranium generates a million times more radioactivity, about a thousandth of which still remains after 100 years.
  4. To date, nuclear power has been built and subsidised through the use of fossil fuels, which have provided the energy for mining, extraction, enrichment and construction. A life-cycle comparison between the carbon dioxide emissions resulting from a nuclear plant and an equivalently sized gas-burning plant indicates that with the poorer uranium ores, below 0.002 per cent, the gas-fired plant comes out better, with lower overall carbon dioxide emissions. Life-cycle analysis done by the Öko-Institute of Germany estimates a carbon dioxide cost of 35 g/kWh. A natural gas co-generation system is even with the nuclear power/natural gas combination in terms of emissions, while being far cheaper to the consumer simply because of the three-fold better efficiency in delivering end-use energy. A cogeneration system based on biogas emits seven times less greenhouse gases in providing end-use energy compared to a nuclear power/natural gas combination.
  5. Proponents claim that a new generation nuclear reactor, the pebble bed modular reaction (PBMR) will produce electricity both economically and safely, but this is on the basis of a new and largely untested technology. Furthermore, much of the expected savings arise because the designers are so confident of the safety of the reactor that they plan to build plants without containment buildings and close to populated areas where the power is required, and to operate them with much lower staffing levels than other types of reactor. However, large questions hang over safety, while the intractable problems of nuclear wastes remains, and it is still at best a temporary solution to the energy problem. It also greatly increases the risks of nuclear proliferation by its very nature.

by Mae-Wan Ho (extracted from the article: “Which Energy“)

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