Andy Murdock opines that following the Fukushima incident in Japan, Germany Chancellor Merkel announced that the country would completely phase out its use of nuclear power by 2022. This move was hailed by anti-nuclear activists, but criticized by some environmentalists. At a critical moment in the fight against climate change, it took away a working clean power source.
When you look at the technology, and you ask yourself, how are we going to solve this problem of climate change, and how are we going to decarbonize? To not have nuclear energy on the table makes the job much harder, said Per Peterson, a professor in UC Berkeley department of nuclear engineering.
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant came online in the early 1970s. Much has changed in the world of nuclear power plant design since then. Peterson is one of the researchers working on next-generation reactors, designed to be so safe that even Homer Simpson could not cause a meltdown. In the last 20 or 30 years, we have developed different types of fuel, which, in fact, physically cannot melt, said Peterson.
Peterson works with pebble-bed reactors, which use small spherical fuel pebbles where the radioactive material is encased in a ceramic shell that can withstand extremely high temperatures. In the case of a power outage or other problem, fuel pebbles empty into a holding tank where they do not need water or other cooling systems like older reactor designs.
The kind of nuclear power plants of The Simpsons or The China Syndrome, are mostly due to be decommissioned by midcentury also still safe. New reactor designs eliminate even the remote risk of meltdowns, operate at much lower pressure than older designs (to minimize explosions), and use fuel more efficiently to reduce waste.
None of these advances can fully overcome nuclear energy biggest obstacle .. fear in some people.
Even meltdowns have been overblown and nuclear remains safer than any other energy source. But read on for details.
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