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Pastimes : The Case for Nuclear Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (8)	1/14/2001 7:18:19 PM
From: Stephen O	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 312

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.