Nuclear as a transition energy source? New information....

Today’s post: Weds, 3-26-2008

Nuclear power plants using uranium are NOT a renewable energy source. (The amount of uranium that can be mined & used is finite & can be all used up.) And, nuclear power plants have serious problems or potential problems with safety in operation, security risks, & waste disposal.

And, even without the political challenges stemming from those problems, they have long lead times to build & take very large capital outlays.

In addition, they may not help global warming all that much since they produce power by using heat that they create directly that was not present in the locations where they are installed before the nuclear plant at each location was installed there.

However, they do have some legitimate advantages & there might be a relatively safe way to deploy some of them as a way to accelerate the transition to renewable energy & away from fossil fuels. The two most important points supporting this were not known to me until very recently. And, most people do not now know them as yet.

Nuclear power plants do NOT produce any CO2. If run properly, they produce very reliable power that is unaffected by lack of sunshine or wind.

In the United States, nuclear plants can produce power that does NOT depend on imports of either petroleum or natural gas -- or on burning coal with its CO2 & air pollution problems.

I’ve known those things for quite a while.

And, since I believe solar & wind power and other renewable sources will grow to provide all the energy we need & have been aware of the risks, particularly the security risks, of producing materials that can be used to release radioactivity or build nuclear weapons by terrorists or comparable governments, I have been mostly against considering more nuclear power plants as a way to turn off our reliance on fossil fuels.

I think & continue to think that our major efforts need to be aimed at increasing renewable energy sources, making our economy dramatically more energy-efficient, & creating disincentives for use of fossil fuels

Recently however, I’ve learned something that gives me a sound reason to think nuclear power plants might be worth considering as a transitional energy and power source. And, & I’ve learned something that might be used to make using them considerably safer than it otherwise might be.

For me, these two points definitely re-open the discussion on something I considered a dead issue.

1. Adding new nuclear power plants has a significant advantage a physicist who is both very knowledgeable & a bit of a fan of nuclear power told me about that I did not know before.:

While solar power & biofuels are just now beginning to have any kind of reasonable positive payback time in terms of the ENERGY needed to build them, the payback time for the energy required to build nuclear reactors is less than 3 months.

He said that at today’s state of the art, it takes more like 20 years or more for solar cells & that’s if they are in ideal locations.

And, we are just beginning to learn how to create biofuels that give us more energy than it costs to produce them so there even IS any positive payback time for the energy used to create them.

This suggests that using the energy from nuclear reactors to provide the new energy needed to produce very large amounts of solar cells & biofuels might make doing so more doable & happen sooner.

And, building new nuclear power plants would help reduce our reliance on fossil fuels & on fossil fuels imported from outside the United States.

2. Here’s the other point I learned about recently that has the potential to make creating & running new nuclear power plants both faster AND safer & more secure.

I’ve known that since 50 years ago, the United States Navy has had nuclear powered submarines.

What I did not know or was just barely aware of until just a few weeks ago is that the United States Navy uses nuclear power plants to power an increasing majority of ALL its ships. Further, it has done so with an extremely good safety record. The ex Navy man who spoke up an a discussion on energy issues I attended recently said that in addition, there are large numbers of men who leave the United States Navy each year who have been properly & adequately trained to operate these nuclear reactors who would be delighted to have good paying jobs using those skills.

This suggests a potential solution of how new nuclear power plant might be used with some degree of safety.

We could make all nuclear power plants a three way joint venture between the United States government as a financing catalyst, which would dramatically shorten the time lag in bringing these plants online reliably; the United States Navy & other armed forces onsite at every nuclear power plant to provide 24 hour a day, seven day a week security, & private companies to handle the management & the sales of the energy produced.

The United States Navy has proven that it can operate nuclear power plants safely; & the contractors that serve it know how to build nuclear power plants that can be run safely.

There are still huge costs involved & serious risks with nuclear power plants. But I wanted to pass on that there are two reasons not generally known by most people to at least consider building new nuclear power plants as a transitional energy source to help create renewable energy & energy independence in the United States.