If we can’t afford oil...

Andrew Kenny debunks the myth that nuclear power is inherently dangerous or bad for the environment – and hails a surge of new nuclear construction around the world

The main environmental concern about nuclear power is radiation – but it is a misplaced concern. Radiation is natural and inescapable, and all living things are bathed in natural radiation hundreds of times greater than they would absorb from a nuclear power station if they were living next to it. The National Radiological Protection Board calculates that the radiation exposure to the British public from the nuclear industry is less than 0.1 per cent of the total exposure, of which 87 per cent is from nature and about 12 per cent from healthcare. Coal power stations release more radioactivity than nuclear ones (because of the radioactive elements in the coal) but it is still utterly insignificant.

Nuclear power is not only much cheaper and more reliable than ‘renewable’ energy such as solar and wind but more environmentally benign. Because nuclear energy is so concentrated, you need few materials and a small space to provide a lot of power. Because wind and solar energy are so dilute, you need large amounts of materials and large space to provide the same power. Moreover, they are intermittent, which greatly adds to their economic and environmental costs.

In Germany, the load factor for nuclear power is 90 per cent (which means it runs at nine tenths of its capacity over a period of time) while the load factor for wind is 17 per cent. So you would need to build over five times the capacity of wind power to produce the same amount of electrical energy as nuclear power. But it’s worse than that because you can depend on nuclear power and you can never depend on wind power.

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Herbert Thornton

September 24th, 2008 1:24am Report this comment

What a pleasure it is to read common sense about nuclear power. The faster this resource is expanded the better and the sooner we will be rid both of the pollution caused by petrol powered vehicles and other burners of oil products - not to mention our consumption of oil being the source of huge funding for people like Osama bin Laden and their bloodthirsty, medieval ambitions.

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