At the beginning of the new year, SEAL is pleased to introduce its new campaign 'Can Nuclear Power Deliver? [1]'. Based on literature review and expert interviews, SEAL's 13th briefing paper provides an overview of arguments in the nuclear debate.
Nuclear peril
- Waste: technical solutions exist, but lack of a political
agreement - Proliferation: can and needs to be managed
- Nuclear safety: an issue for older nuclear plants, but
promising 'passive safety' designs for new reactors
The nuclear promise
- The power of the atom: a fistful of matter holding enough
energy to power a city of a million for a year - Climate change mitigation: each major nuclear power station
saves 6 million tonne of greenhouse gasses per year compared to fossil-based electricity
generation - Energy security: abundant energy supply when using advanced
reprocessing and fast neutron reactors
From peril to promise
- Public opinion - taken hostage by extremes
- Technology: extremely complex scientific & technical
challenges need global cooperation and a 'man on the moon' momentum
Conclusion
Nuclear technology needs to address its problems, and holds tremendous promise if it does. The 'nuclear option' does not represent a single option, but offers many choices on building additional reactors, a moratorium ( no new reactors), phaseout (reduce existing reactors), reactor types, waste processing and R&D expenditure.
When excluding all nuclear options, a plan is needed how to build an energy system without it. The fact that we yet have to see such a (transparent) plan may relate to the fact that the numbers simply do not add up without the use of nuclear energy.