U.N.: Nuclear Energy May Be Back in Vogue

PARIS (Reuters) - Expectations of a sharp rise in energy demand and the risk of climate change are pushing many countries to return to the idea of nuclear power, the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog said Monday.

Even the most conservative estimates predict at least a doubling of energy usage by mid-century, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told a conference on nuclear energy in the 21st century.

He said any discussion of the energy sector "must begin by acknowledging the expected substantial growth in energy demand in the coming decades."
...
But he warned despite an improved atomic energy industry: "Nuclear power was dealt a heavy blow by the tragedy of the 1986 Chernobyl accident, a blow from which the reputation of the nuclear industry has never fully recovered."

The explosion at the Chernobyl plant in then-Soviet Ukraine, the world's worst civil nuclear accident, spewed a cloud of radioactivity across Europe and has been blamed for thousands of deaths from radiation-linked illness. More than 100,000 people had to be resettled.

http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=7958336

link: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1675567&mesg_id=1675600

Some further serious reading on this
Edited on Mon Mar-21-05 08:51 AM by Coastie for Truth


1. The boring engineering and geology--

a. Hubbert's Peak : The Impending World Oil Shortage
By: Kenneth S. Deffeyes

b. Out of Gas: The End of the Age Of Oil By: David Goodstein



2. The petro-politics--

a. Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power By: Daniel Yergin

b. Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed--and How to Stop It, Revised Edition By: Rachel Ehrenfeld

c. A Century Of War : Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order... By: F. William Engdahl

d. House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties by Craig Unger



I have deliberately avoided the booooring geology and equally boooring chemical engineering and petroleum refining engineering books -- but if you really want it - try Transport Phenomena, 2nd Edition by R. Byron Bird, et al -- if I had to suffer through it...

It's not so much petro-politics any more (although the petro-politics kept us from developing alternative and renewable energy strategies -- and allowed us to avoid serious work on nuclear waste management) - it's geology.

http://lists.myspinach.org/pipermail/urg/2004-May/001513.html

Again, Peak Oil will be rapidly followed by Peak Uranium...

breeder reactors (with major non-proliferation issues) - followed by thorium reactors.

Fermi 1 (US), BN-350 and BN-600 (RU), SuperPhenix (FR), Monju (JA), FBTR (IN) suffered serious sodium fires that led to prolonged shutdowns and/or decommissioning.

Furthermore, the SuperPhenix reactor consumed more Pu-239 than it produced.

Reprocessing spent fuel to recover Pu is enormously expensive and costs many-fold more than "conventional" uranium fuel. The cost of Japan's new reprocessing plant is $20 billion and climbing - and there is little hope that this investment will ever break even, let alone make a profit...

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=mj01burnie

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ma01makhijani

The bottom line is this: breeders don't work and reprocessing is exorbitantly uneconomic.

As for the thorium cycle - it simply doesn't exist and is not even in the planning stage. No one can say if it will ever be built or operated at a profit...

world with nuclear weapons. We must not lose sight of this. They came into office criticizing the Clinton administration for abiding by nuclear treaties and other weapons treaties. The arms race is on again and the sacrifice and suffering of the cold war was in vain and nothing was accomplished by breaking up the USSR except to make it much more difficult to control the arms and nuclear warheads spread all over the world.

I tend to agree, we SHOULD build these things. They are meltdown proof, prefab (ie cheap), and still provide a lot of energy. Plus you can use their hydrogen byproduct to fuel hydrogen powered cars.

The world of Nuclear power has marched passed the US's view of things in the last 20 years.

also and then you have a bunch of useless nuke plants all over the place.