By John Moran
For nearly seventy years, the prospect of a nuclear world has existed. The experiments with Chicago Pile-1, the first functioning nuclear reactor, displayed the near limitless power that can be produced through nuclear means. Yet, after all these years, the world is still extremely limited in its use of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy throughout history has been shown to be efficient, powerful, and relatively clean. However, due to fears that it is more dangerous and dirty than already established fossil fuels, nuclear power is largely ignored and therefore underdeveloped. Now, what is the validity of these fears, and what could come of the nuclear energy industry if we committed to investing more into the field?
Nuclear energy often evokes images of public health disasters, such as the failures in Chernobyl and Fukushima. However, the reality is that such incidents are extremely rare today, and, considering the health risks posed by other energy sources, nuclear power is one of the safest sources of electricity. Statistically, nuclear energy production has been far safer than oil production. In terms of pure numbers, more than 8 million people have died directly as a result of coal, oil, and other fossil fuel pollutants, throughout history—the highest death estimates caused by nuclear accidents reach only 9,000. Even considering the relative popularity of fossil fuels compared to nuclear energy, nuclear energy maintains the lowest death rate per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy produced compared to oil, gas, wind, and solar power. The stigma around the danger of nuclear production isn’t based in fact, only in the fear of a new and relatively unestablished technology.
Much of the worry around nuclear pollution is due to fear of the development of cancers and diseases. However, few acknowledge that the breathing in of fossil fuels can also cause severe health conditions. Smog in cities has led to millions of illnesses and contributed greatly to the death toll of the fossil fuel industry displayed above. “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana is an example of the harm that can be inflicted upon communities by the fossil fuel industry. Cancer Alley is a strip along the Mississippi River, home to the highest concentration of chemical and gas plants in the United States. Due to the polluted air, the chances of developing cancer are forty-six in one million people, as compared to the U.S. national average of thirty in one million. On a broader scale, coal power plants release more radioactive material per kWh into the environment, in the form of coal ash, than nuclear power plants under standard shielding protocols. Fossil fuels are just as guilty as nuclear energy in causing dangerous illness, but due to social stigma, only nuclear energy is vilified for it.
Additionally, the fears around the cleanliness around nuclear energy are exaggerated, as it produces less waste than other means of energy production, and, what waste it does generate, can be easily controlled. Ultimately, between nuclear waste and waste produced by fossil fuels, nuclear is the lesser of the two evils. The byproducts of oil and coal, greenhouse gasses, cause far more immediate and threatening problems than nuclear waste causes. Also, since nuclear fuel is so dense, more energy is produced through nuclear fission than oil and coal for the same amount of waste. Over the course of a year, a one thousand-megawatt nuclear power station would only produce about 3 cubic meters of high radioactivity waste, whereas a one thousand-megawatt coal plant would produce upwards of six million tons of carbon dioxide. Because of nuclear waste’s environmental threats, strict regulations ensure its safe containment. The small amounts of waste that nuclear energy does produce is stored in containers known as “dry casks,” concrete casks, in which a steel tube is encased. Inside the steel tube is the fuel assembly, which is a unit of zirconium cladding covering the nuclear material), which are buried in storage areas near the power plants in which they are produced. It is true that these casks and the nuclear waste will exist and stay radioactive for centuries due to nuclear half-life (the gradual reduction of nuclear energy, which can take hundreds of years), but casks are designed to withstand natural disaster and other circumstance without leakage and are stored on-site in nuclear plants, in the United States.
In the end, nuclear energy is not perfect—but it doesn’t need to be. When it comes down to nuclear energy or fossil fuels, nuclear is the far better option, and, by discounting nuclear energy, instead waiting for the perfect energy source to emerge, we continue to approach climate crisis.
What can happen when we are able to look past these stigmas? We are able to see that nuclear power is more efficient and clean than other forms of sources of energy. The most visible advantage nuclear energy has is its capacity to produce incredible amounts of energy. A single nuclear power plant can power an entire city. The biggest nuclear plant in the world produces 7,965 megawatts. A typical coal plant’s capability is only six hundred megawatts, with the biggest coal plant only being 6,700 megawatts. Another advantage of nuclear energy is in its nuclear power plants’ fuel requirements, in comparison to those of oil or coal plants. Once a nuclear plant is fueled, it doesn’t need to be refueled for at least a year and a half. Fossil fuel plants, on the other hand, require constant refueling. This provides both a financial benefit and convenience in management. Another advantage comes in the form of nuclear energy’s environmental effects. The world needs power, that is simply a fact, thus the problem of global warming will persist until a cleaner source of power is found—nuclear energy can be that source.
These advantages have been present for decades, but what has come of nuclear energy in recent times? What advancements could come in the future? The field of nuclear energy, while limited in development, has come a long way, and nuclear power is on the verge of multiple new breakthroughs, among them sustainable nuclear fusion and the use of small modular reactors.
Nuclear fusion is the next step in nuclear energy. Currently, the process for creating nuclear reactions is through nuclear fission, which occurs when a neutron is smashed into a larger atom, which forces the atom to split into two smaller atoms, releasing a massive amount of energy in the process. However, there is another process that has a number of advantages, the first of which being that it produces many times more energy than fission, the second of which being that it produces absolutely zero waste. This process is fusion, which occurs when two atoms slam together to form an even larger atom. Unfortunately, it has yet to be accomplished commercially, due to the massive amounts of pressure required to keep the two atoms together after they collide. If this process were to be fully established, it would create a completely clean and near limitless source of energy for the entire world. And progress is being made on the fusion front. Recently, at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, an experiment occurred in which a high powered laser was aimed at a capsule of hydrogen until the hydrogen was induced into a fusion reaction. In past experiments, the amount of energy the laser took to power outweighed the output by the fusion reaction. However, in this particular experiment, the reaction produced more power than it took to induce the reaction, after the National Ignition Facility team worked on the proper laser properties and fuel cell properties. This is a massive development and proves that an energy gain from fusion can occur artificially in a controlled fashion.
Another development is in the field of Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s). This new concept offers solutions to problems presented by nuclear power, but instead of using radical new technologies like fusion, it uses previously established technologies in a new format. The problems it could solve would be mostly related to cost and scale. Full scale nuclear reactors are expensive to keep safe (though not necessarily more so than fossil fuel plants). Reactors are also typically very large, and because of this scale, they are difficult to monitor and manage. SMR’s are a proposed solution to these issues. The basic principle of SMR’s is that smaller reactors are cheaper to run and build; a smaller reactor with a smaller fuel source requires less radioactive shielding and oversight, which saves money in the long term. The smaller scale would require less necessary maintenance, while still being safe. SMR’s produce around 300 megawatts, which is only about a third of a usual nuclear plant’s capability. However, their inherent modularity will allow for SMR’s to be taken away and added as needs and costs dictate. One of the biggest draws to SMR technology is that the technology required to make SMR’s already exists. SMR’s use the same processes as current reactors use, just on a shrunken scale. SMR’s offer a viable solution to many of the problems within nuclear energy itself—those being cost, management, and scale—as well as providing the solutions that nuclear power represents: waste management, lack of emissions, and amount of production—and it does so with immediately available technology.
The prospect of nuclear energy is an exciting one, but before we as a society are able to pursue it, we must push past the barriers that have been set up by social stigma. Nuclear energy is truly viable, and is especially prudent given the circumstances of our growing climate crisis. The field as it exists currently is in an exciting state, and it will become increasingly promising as investment is placed into it. The age of nuclear energy could be right around the corner, as long as we allow ourselves to take the turn.
