Nuclear Energy stirs up lots of emotions in people. For many, it is the fear of the unknown. We see the wind blow, we see the sun shine, we see water flow, we see fires burn. However, we really don't see nuclear reactions in our day to day lives. What is more, we hear horror stories in the media about "disasters" surrounding nuclear energy, while we don't hear too many disasters that surround other sources of energy. What is ironic, is nuclear power is the safest form of energy per kilowatt hour generated. (Source)
Nuclear energy is relatively clean as well. It does not put out air pollutants like all fossil fuels do. It does not take a large land footprint like so called "environmentally friendly" renewables. There is a problem with long term waste disposal, but that is more of a political issue than a physical problem. Fuels could be encased in concrete and buried in many areas above the water table. Or, the fuels could be reprocessed and chemically separated from the waste materials, bringing the current efficiency of around 1.5% to many times greater, depending on the reprocessing method.
Many people worry about the radiation from nuclear power generation. If you are worried about radiation, you should worry about radon in your home, not power generation. Natural sources compose of over 80% of the radiation we get, and nearly all of the remaining comes from medical sources and consumer products (smoke detectors and glow in the dark products). Occupational sources include soil density gauges and military applications. Fallout is leftovers from the nuclear weapons testing. The portion we are discussing, the "Nuclear Fuel Cycle" composes 0.1% of our radiation intake.
Breeder reactors could be better utilized. Right now, almost all reactors run on U235, which is about as rare as platinum. The U235 represents about 0.7% of all Uranium that comes out of the ground. The remaining U238 is stockpiled, or used in military hardware such as tank armor and armor piercing rounds. Instead of stock piling this leftover Uranium, it can be put into a breeder reactor, where it gets hit with a neutron to become U239, which is unstable and will become Pu239 through a beta decay process. Those fuel rods can then be reprocessed and the Pu239 reprocessed and burned in a reactor for energy production. This will increase the efficiency of our current nuclear reactors many fold (depending on the details of the breeding process).
What is more interesting, is most reactors were designed and built more than half a century ago. We are looking at mid 1900's technology. Since that time, there have been vast improvements in nuclear technology, but improvements have been held up by various regulators.
Chernobyl was a big disaster, but you got to realize that the reactor cannot be licensed in the United States, or any other Westernized country. It did not have a containment vessel. That huge concrete dome that is so recognizable is there to contain all the water within the reactor should it flash into steam. The steam vessel heated up too much to be contained, and was blown off, exposing the reactor directly to the environment. Other issues like the positive feedback loop (meaning the power output increases as the reactor heats up) made this a dangerous system to operate.
Fukushima was a bad problem as well. Japan had a sea wall designed for the plant, but it was never built. The tsunami came an wiped out the generator's coolant pumps. For all the hysteria of that plant disaster, there were few lives lost. From wiki: (link)
While there were no deaths caused by radiation exposure, approximately 18,500 people died due to the earthquake and tsunami. Very few cancers would be expected as a result of the very low radiation doses received by the public.[25] John Ten Hoeve and Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson suggest that according to the linear no-threshold model (LNT) the accident is most likely to cause an eventual total of 130 (15-1100) cancer deaths, while noting that the validity of the LNT model at such low doses remains the subject of debate.[26] Radiation epidemiologist Roy Shore contends that estimating health effects in a population from the LNT model "is not wise because of the uncertainties".[27] The LNT model did not accurately model casualties from Chernobyl, Hiroshima or Nagasaki; it greatly overestimated the casualties. Evidence that the LNT model is a gross distortion of damage from radiation has existed since 1946, and was suppressed by Nobel Prize winner Hermann Muller in favour of assertions that no amount of radiation is safe.[28][29][30]
In 2013 (two years after the incident), the World Health Organization indicated that the residents of the area who were evacuated were exposed to little radiation that radiation induced health impacts are likely to be below detectable levels.[31] The health risks in the WHO assessment attributable to the Fukushima radioactivity release were calculated by largely applying the conservative Linear no-threshold model of radiation exposure, a model that assumes even the smallest amount of radiation exposure will cause a negative health effect.[32]Oddly enough, the panic is far more likely to cause suffering and death than the accident itself.
A survey by the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun computed that there were 1,600 deaths related to the evacuation, comparable to the 1,599 deaths due to the earthquake and tsunami in the Fukushima Prefecture.[52]
In the former Soviet Union, many patients with negligible radioactive exposure after the Chernobyl disaster displayed extreme anxiety about low level radiation exposure, and therefore developed many psychosomatic problems, including radiophobia, and with this an increase in fatalistic alcoholism being observed.
Conclusion
While not perfect, Nuclear Energy has proved itself as cleaner, safer, and more reliable than other existing systems.There are new systems being developed that will prove even cleaner, cheaper, more reliable and more efficient in the near future when we are allowed to fully develop them. Even though nuclear energy has proved itself far safer than other forms of energy, regulations have strangled it's development due to it's complexity and fearmongering.
In the next article in this series, we will look into some newer developments in the nuclear industry.
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