Originally published January 20 2006
Nuclear power can be efficient energy source if properly regulated
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
While many people immediately recognize Chernobyl and the limits of nuclear power; many aren’t aware that nuclear power accounts for 75 percent of their electricity.
In France, for instance, about 75 percent of electricity is generated from nuclear power.
See the chart below to compare energy generation costs.
Compared with coal, still used to produce 50% of the US electricity needs, nuclear is clean.
Its waste, although highly toxic, is compact and when handled correctly, safe.
Uranium, the fuel reactors use, is widely available in the continental US and Canada.
Stable supply means lower long-term costs -- especially when compared with oil and gas fired plants which are now producing about 20% of US electricity.
Reactor designs such as the Canadian CANDU can be very safe and less expensive to build than most reactors in use today.
One drawback to this design, unfortunately, is its ability to produce weapons grade plutonium as a byproduct.
Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility: a pebble-bed reactor (PBR) -- sometimes also known as a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR).
What makes it so safe is the fuel: instead of conventional fuel rods made of enriched uranium, PBRs use small, pyrolytic graphite coated pebbles with uranium cores.
As a PBR reactor gets hotter, the rapid motion of atoms in the fuel decreases probability of neutron capture by U-235 atoms.
PBRs use high-pressure helium gas, not water, for cooling.
Each tennis ball-sized pebble is rotated and/or checked for reactivity by removing them from the bottom of the funnel shaped reactor core.
Hydrogen, found primarily in water, is expensive to extract as a gas.
These new reactors run at high temperatures which are perfect for cracking abundant water or helium gas into hydrogen which can then be used as a green fuel -- burning hydrogen just produces water vapor.
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