There was an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail about two weeks back about Nuclear. It stated that there was more radiation put into the atmosphere from burning coal and releasing the minute amounts of background radiation from Uranium than would occur with a nuclear reactor generating the same amount of power.
I found the article here it is:
Nuclear power is the best deterrent to
greenhouse gases
DONALD JONES
Thursday, January 4, 2001
The recent talks in The Hague on possible ways to mitigate the
effects of greenhouse gases on the world climate did not promote
the one option that does not produce any greenhouse gases:
nuclear. For some reason, the "N" word strikes terror in the
hearts of the so-called environmentalists who influenced the talks.
Those concerns need to be addressed and corrected.
A popular myth is that nuclear power is an unsafe and untested
way to generate electricity. Wrong. Nuclear plants have been
generating electricity for half a century, with thousands of reactor
years of experience. For example, France relies on nuclear power
for more than 70 per cent of its electricity, the United States 19
per cent and Ontario 55 per cent. Ontario has been using nuclear
generation since before 1970.
There has not been one death or injury to the public related to
commercial nuclear power outside the old Soviet Union. The
design of the Chernobyl station would not be licensed to operate in
North America or Europe, and Three Mile Island was a financial
disaster, not a nuclear one.
Is radiation from nuclear plants a danger to health? No it's not.
More radioactive material is put into the atmosphere from a
coal-fired station than from a nuclear station. The Canadian
Nuclear Safety Commission closely monitors emissions and all
other aspects of design and operation.
But what about nuclear waste, a danger to present and future
generations? This is no longer a technical issue. The used fuel from
a reactor is highly radioactive, but after being kept for five to six
years in water-filled pools at the station, it decays to a small
fraction of the original amount and can then be stored dry in
above-ground steel-lined concrete canisters, where it can remain
indefinitely or until it is moved to a permanent repository. The
permanent repository will be in the deep stable rock of the
Canadian Shield.
This Canadian concept for disposal of used fuel has been reviewed
by a federal environmental review panel, which concluded that the
concept was technically sound but that broad public support
needed to be obtained. After about 300 years, the radiation from
typical Candu fuel will be the same as the original natural uranium.
Plutonium is intimately mixed in with the used fuel and it will remain
radioactive for many thousands of years, but the radiation from the
plutonium is weak and becomes a concern only if the material is
ingested or gets into the lungs. The whole intent of the disposal
facility is to stop this from happening. Even though the North
American nuclear industry will store the used fuel after it comes
out of reactors, other countries such as Britain, France and Russia
have developed reprocessing facilities to make use of the fissile
material in the used fuel to make new fuel.
So is nuclear power uneconomical, compared with other ways of
generating electricity? No way, not with natural gas prices shooting
up. Production costs for electricity from nuclear power plants are
lower than for combined cycle gas turbine plants, which are being
built all over the world because they are relatively cheap to
construct. Because of the low production costs of operating
nuclear stations, it is proving more economical to extend their
lives rather than invest in natural-gas fired plants. Yet gas and coal
plants get a free ride when it comes to polluting the environment
with greenhouse gases, smog and acid rain.
It's interesting that the environmentalists worry about the
hypothetical impact of plutonium on future generations thousands
of years from now when we may not even make it through the next
few hundred years if we don't get started on greenhouse gas
mitigation. We want to hear that "N" word more often.
Donald Jones is an engineer with Atomic Energy of Canada
Ltd., involved in the design of nuclear power stations. |
