Nuclear power, revisited

Nuclear energy became anathema after nuclear plant accidents released radioactivity into the environment. But in the wake of environmental accidents due to oil spills and growing concerns about the environmental impact of burning coal, nuclear power is making a comeback.

More than 100 new nuclear power plants are planned to come online, worldwide, over the next 10 years. Lessons learned since Three-Mile Island insure that the new reactors will be safer.

Still a challenge to acceptance and wide-spread use of nuclear power is the disposal of high-level nuclear wastes (HLW), especially the spent fuel rods, which may continue to emit dangerous levels of radiation for a million years. Disposal of HLW is not just a scientific issue but a political hot potato.

Image of the atom from here.

Going nuclear

It’s clean and efficient, but reservations to using nuclear power have kept this energy alternative from growing.

Nuclear plant accidents, the accidental release of radiation into the environment, although rare, make headline news, as in the 1979 accident at Pennsylvanian's Three-Mile Island reactor and the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl reactor in the former Soviet Union.

A larger concern is how to dispose of the radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants. This waste will remain radioactive for hundreds or thousands of years. Improved technologies and new materials can help to minimize these concerns, still, our generation faces the considerable challenge of designing a radioactive waste disposal plan that will endure for many generations to come.

Illustration: schematic diagram of a nuclear power plant. From http://www.hk-phy.org/energy/power/print/nuclear_phy_print_e.html