nuclear technologies that are safer and
cheaper will likely be necessary for
nuclear energy to meet its full potential
as a critical climate mitigation
technology.”
While ecomodernists think that
nuclear power could be a useful tool in
slowing climate change, more
traditional environmental
organisations vehemently disagree.
“Nuclear power
already delivers
less energy
globally than
renewable energy,
and the share will
continue to
decrease in the
coming years,”
Greenpeace writes
on its website.
“Building enough
nuclear power
stations to make a
meaningful
reduction in
greenhouse gas
emissions would
cost trillions of
dollars, create tens of thousands of tons
of lethal high-level radioactive waste,
contribute to further proliferation of
nuclear weapons materials, and result
in a Chernobyl-scale accident once
every decade. Perhaps most
significantly, it will squander the
resources necessary to implement
meaningful climate change solutions.”
Those resources are significant.
The centralised nature of nuclear
power, compared to decentralised
renewables, means that finding the
cash to pay for new reactors is not
easy. “The nuclear power industry isabout really big engineering projects
that take many years of planning,
with designs that must be approved
by regulators and take many years to
get approval,” explains Caldecott. “It
just can’t compete against
decentralised renewable technologies
that can be deployed quick ly.”
A number of new approaches to
nuclear energy have been proposed
that could solve some of those
problems. Despite the scarcity of third-
generation reactors around the world,
a fourth generation is already on the
drawing board. These are able to use
far more of the available uranium,
making them significantly more
economical. Yet they still need major
research and development before they
can be built, which is a tall order in
today’s nuclear-averse society. “I
personally don’t think that we’re going
to see a large-scale deployment of
generation-four reactors any time in
the future,” says Muellner.
Another potential option is to build
thorium-fuelled reactors. Thorium
produces far less dangerous waste than
conventional nuclear energy and is
three times more abundant in the
Earth’s crust than uranium, although
it also has its downsides. It will
require significant research and
development investment before it
could be rolled out, and processing
the fuel involves extremely high
radiation levels. In a 2012 report into
the technology, the Bulletin Of The
Atomic Scientists journal wrote that
thorium would “require too great an
investment and provide no clear
payoff ”. Yet there are still some
researchers who believe thorium
to be the way to go.NEW-LOOK
NUCLEAR
ABOVE: Reactors aboard
floating nuclear power plants
would be easy
to cool, but there could
be an added risk of sinkingPHOTO: MIT