Can nuclear power solve the energy crisis? It depends who you ask
The path to net zero is unclear
More bang for your buck with batteries?
While the falling costs of solar and wind energy continue to exceed expectations, nuclear construction projects remain expensive behemoths with “a history of cost overruns … around the world” argue MV Ramana and Xiao Wei, experts in security and energy supply at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
Bill Lee and Michael Rushton, lecturers in nuclear energy at Bangor University, are unconvinced. They argue that battery technology simply isn’t advanced enough to do what reactors are already capable of doing within the vanishing window of opportunity to avert catastrophic global warming.
They argue that balancing supply represents just a fraction of nuclear power’spotential contribution to decarbonization. The government has also nudged the industry regulator to begin the approval process for Rolls-Royce SMR’s small modular reactor design.
The company announced in 2020 that it hoped to bring 16 of these reactors — which are much smaller, cheaper to build, and typically generate one-third of the energy of a traditional nuclear power plant — online by 2025.
“Because they burn the fuel more efficiently, this new generation of reactors also produces much less nuclear waste,” say Lee and Rushton. They believe that:
And that’s not all, they say.
Future threats and opportunities
Not everyone is convinced that nuclear power is a reliable tool in the effort to slow global warming and shore up energy supplies though. Paul Dorfman is an honorary senior research associate at UCL’s Energy Institute. He argues that “nuclear energy is, quite literally,“on the frontline of climate change– and not in a good way”.
“Nuclear power is often credited with offeringenergysecurity in an increasingly turbulent world, but climate change will rewrite these old certainties,” Dorfman says.
“Nuclear power plants must draw from large sources of water to cool their reactors, hence why they’re often built near the sea,” Dorfman highlights. “Two in five nuclear plants operate on the coast and at least 100 have been built just a few meters above sea level.
In a world made increasingly turbulent by climate change, that’s a problem, Dorfman argues.
“A recent US Army War College report also states that nuclear power facilities are at high risk of temporary or permanent closure due to climate threats – with 60% of US nuclear capacity at risk from future sea-level rise, severe storms, and cooling water shortages.”
Could nuclear fusion save us? It wasn’t so long ago that Boris Johnson’s Conservatives were bullish about the prospect of a reactor being able toharness the power within starsby 2040. Thomas Nicholas, a Ph.D. candidate in plasma science and fusion energy at the University of York, set the record straight in 2019:
“Unlike current nuclear power plants — which split atoms in a process called fission — nuclear fusion binds atomic nuclei together. This releases much more energy than fission and produces no high-level nuclear waste.”
Because of the embryonic status of fusion research (what many hailed as a recent breakthrough still puts the world on track for possibledemonstration fusion power plantsby the 2050s), Nicholas argues that:
This article byJack MarleyEnvironment + Energy Editor, UK edition,isrepublished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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