The World Really Could Go Nuclear

Uranium (Nuclear Minerals) / Nuclear Power - Economics, Design, & Industry

Date posted: 09/15/15

David Biello opines that in just two decades Sweden went from burning oil for generating electricity to nuclear power. And if the world as a whole were to follow that example, all fossil fuel - fired power plants could be replaced with nuclear facilities in a little over 30 years. That is the conclusion of a new nuclear grand plan published May 13 in PLoS One. Such a switch would drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, nearly achieving much-ballyhooed global goals to combat climate change. Even swelling electricity demands, concentrated in developing nations, could be met. All that is missing is the wealth, will and wherewithal to build hundreds of nuclear power plants, largely due to concerns about safety and cost. If we are serious about tackling emissions and climate change, no climate-neutral source should be ignored, argues Staffan Qvist, a physicist at Uppsala University, who led the effort to develop this nuclear plan. The mantra nuclear can not be done quickly enough to tackle climate change is one of the most pervasive in the debate today and mostly just taken as true, while the data prove the exact opposite. The data Qvist and his co-author Barry Brook, an ecologist and computer modeler at the University of Tasmania, relied on comes from two countries in Europe - Sweden and France. The Swedes began research to build nuclear reactors in 1962 in a bid to wean the country off burning oil for power as well as to protect rivers from hydroelectric dams. By 1972, the first boiling water reactor at Oskarshamn began to host fission and churn out electricity. The cost was roughly $1,400 per kilowatt of electric capacity (in 2005 dollars), which is cheap compared to the $7,000 per kilowatt of electric capacity of two new advanced nuclear reactors being built in the U.S. right now. By 1986, with the addition of 11 more reactors, half of Swedish electricity came from nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions per Swede had dropped by 75 percent. Good read.