Earthsky

Paul Wilson believes nuclear power is a good, safe choice

May 25, 2009 - Energy

Paul Wilson: I think that the public opinion of nuclear energy has been increasing for the last decade. One of the major reasons for that is concern about global climate change, and the recognition that nuclear energy has a big role to play in reducing the amount of greenhouse gases we emit.

Paul Wilson is nuclear scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Wilson is one scientist who believes that nuclear power is a proven means to supply the growing demand for clean energy.

Paul Wilson: I think we need to have nuclear energy as a big option in our energy future because it has no direct emissions of greenhouse gases.

Wilson said that what nuclear plants do emit – spent nuclear fuel – is compact and contained.

Paul Wilson: Spent nuclear fuel stays where you put it. You can put it somewhere, and you can watch it, and you can keep it safe with relatively little effort.

We asked Wilson about the concern that more nuclear energy would mean more nuclear weapons.

Paul Wilson: Most commercial nuclear power systems are very hard to turn into military nuclear power systems. And so, there are a lot of different techniques we can use to avoid that.

He said those techniques include both advanced technology and political diplomacy.

Dr. Wilson added that nuclear could produce more of the world’s energy.

Paul Wilson: Right now, nuclear energy provides about 20% of the United States electricity, a little bit less of the world’s electricity. That works out to about 7% of total energy we consume. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for total energy fraction to go up, because nuclear energy can be used to produce transportation fuels. We can use it to produce hydrogen. We can use the heat to help with biofuel processing.

He emphasized that scientists such as himself are working to solve the problem of disposing spent nuclear fuel.

Paul Wilson: A few decades into the future, we can decide whether we want to bury it permanently underground, keeping it safe there, or whether we’d like to be reprocessing and recycling it, into new nuclear fuel to put into new nuclear reactors to get more energy out of it. Which seems to most people in the nuclear industry that seems like the choice that makes the most sense, ultimately.

And he said that the waste produced is far smaller, and less dangerous, than energy sources which emit greenhouse gases.

Paul Wilson: I like to put that in perspective and point out how small it actually is, compared to the waste streams that are coming out of every other choice we have for electricity right now.

Wilson believes that nuclear energy must be part of a mix of other alternative energy sources.

Paul Wilson: We’ve got a continuing improvement in our safety. We’ve got one of the safest industries in the country.

Written by Lindsay Patterson

  • bill novajosky

    I live in Virginia and it is maddening that Dominion Resources is building a COAL fired plant in Wise County and is determined to have another in Surry County. There is a Nuclear Facility running in Surry now.It’s about profit -not the planet.



    John McCain said he wanted to build 40+ nuclear plants when he was on the campaign trail.Where is he now? Can’t be that he has something more urgent!



    IGNORING NUCLEAR IS THE REAL MELTDOWN!
  • Hank

    I am in agreement with Dr. Wilson’s assessment on nuclear power. It is key to our energy future.



    Most objections to nuclear power are based on old and outdated arguments and fears:



    Outdated argument #1 – It is unsafe in operation, resulting in nuclear accidents



    Many cite Chernobyl as a prime example of the danger of a nuclear meltdown. However, Chernobyl did not have a nuclear meltdown. The Chernobyl plant was of a very old and rudimentary RBMK graphite / steam design. It had no containment in its design. When graphite and steam reach a high temperature, they become explosive. That’s what happened at Chernobyl. The cheap RBMK design should have never made it off the design board because it was so poorly designed and unsafe to operate that a meltdown wasn’t a question of if but when. Most nuclear plants today are of a very safe AGR (Advanced Gas Reactor) or PWR (Pressurized Water Reactor) design which are naturally fission stable and will automatically counter thermal runaway.



    Outdated argument #2: The spent nuclear fuel cannot be safely stored



    This excerpt of an article explains a French solution:



    “And so at last we find ourselves standing in that one room in La Hague, the place where the French keep all the nuclear waste from 25 years of producing 80 percent of their electricity beneath the floor. I have thought about this room for months. Now I am standing in it.



    It is a bit larger than I imagined. Somehow I had seen it as about the size of a small visitors center. Instead it is more like a large basketball gymnasium. Still, it’s one large room. In the floor there are about 40 manhole covers stenciled with Areva’s triangular logo. All are so tightly sealed with no visible handles it seems impossible they could ever be removed.



    They’re magnetized, Naugnot explains. He points to the ceiling. See this large how do you say it in English.



    Gantry?



    Yes, gantry. There’s a magnetized crane that removes them. Inside the plug there’s another cap with handles. The crane can grasp them as well. The canisters are very small. There’s room for six in each ring. They’re stacked six-deep beneath the floor. The total material stored here for each French citizen is ten grams about the weight of a two-Euro coin.



    And that’s it, the sum total of what the French call les dechets their nuclear waste. Even this storage is only temporary. The material can be retrieved any time the French Parliament decides that recycling of more radioactive isotopes is economical. The entire environmental footprint of 25 years of producing the France’s electricity, the equivalent of all those sulfur sludge piles and billions of tons of carbon dioxide hurled into the atmosphere is right here beneath my feet. The French have proved in practice what we can only say in theory – there is no such thing as nuclear waste.”



    Finally, nuclear reactor design has come a long way since those placed into operation in the United States back in the 60’s and 70’s. The Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear plant has 10 times the efficiency of plants in operation today.

  • Benjamin Napier

    We can reprocesss nuclear fuel and reuse it in breeder reactors. Again, like so many things, the nuclear “problem” is political and not technical. We should seriously consider nuclear energy, not because of climate change ( a made up “emergency” but to cut our reliance on hydrocarbon fuels.



    If we really believed tnat nuclear energy was bad, we wouldn’t be sponsoring its use in the United Arab Emirates, now would we?

blog comments powered by Disqus