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

Inherently safe

The one real nuclear problem is weapons proliferation. The prospect of rogue nations or terrorists getting hold of nuclear weapons is a terrifying one. But this has very little to do with nuclear power. Sweden, Switzerland and Japan have nuclear power but no nuclear weapons; Israel has nuclear weapons but no nuclear power. The technology for making nuclear weapons is fairly well known. If you banned all nuclear power, you would not reduce the threat of weapons proliferation one iota; indeed you would probably increase it, since there would be less inspection of nuclear installations. The only solution for this problem is political.

The existing generation of nuclear power reactors, which are mainly light water reactors, has proved very safe. The next generation will be safer. They are called ‘advanced’ reactors, but a better term would be ‘simplified’, since they have reduced the number of components and active mechanisms and have increased passive or inherent safety.

My favourite is the Westinghouse AP1000, which uses natural convection to remove heat in the very unlikely case of a loss of coolant accident. The French/German ‘European pressurised reactor’ (EPR) uses multiple safety trains to do the same. The Japanese have developed an advanced boiling water reactor with passive safety features. The Russians, Canadians and Koreans are designing new and better reactors. South Africa, where I live, is developing the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, a small, completely inherently safe reactor that will be cooled by helium and have fuel in the form of coated uranium pellets imbedded in graphite spheres (‘pebbles’) the size of snooker balls.

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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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