Prof. Barry Brook is making the case for clean, safe nuclear power better than anyone else I can think of. Barry is getting published and interviewed – in part because he explains the central points so clearly. An example is this June, 2009 op-ed for The Australian. Excerpt:
(…) Worldwide, nuclear power is undergoing a renaissance. There are 45 so-called ‘Generation III’ reactors currently under construction, including 12 in China, and another 388 are planned or proposed.
These modern reactor designs are efficient, with capacity factors exceeding 90%, and have a high degree of passive safety based on the inherent principles of physics. For instance, the risk of a meltdown as serious as the Three Mile Island incident (which resulted in no fatalities) for GE-Hitachi’s Economic and Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR), has been assessed as once every 29 million reactor years. So judging the ESBWR against the type of reactor that was destroyed at Chernobyl is like comparing the safety of a World War I biplane against a modern jetliner.
In terms of costs and build times, standardised, modular, passive-safety designs, which can be factory built and shipped to site, are game changers for the industry.
The future of nuclear power is brighter still. Although the 2006 Switkowski report on nuclear power in Australia hardly mentioned so-called `fast reactors’, these have the potential to provide vast amounts of clean, baseload energy, for thousands of years.
For instance, there is a technology developed between 1984 and 1994 at the Argonne National Laboratory in the US, called the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), which burns up 99 per cent of the nuclear fuel, leaves only a small amount of waste which drops below background levels of radiation within 300 years, shuts itself down if the control systems fail or the operators walk away, and cannot be used to generate weapons-grade material. A new book by Tom Blees, Prescription for the Planet, describes this technology in fascinating detail.
The IFR, and other `Generation IV’ designs using depleted uranium and thorium as a fuel, offers a realistic future for nuclear power as the world’s primary source of sustainable, carbon-free energy. And the cost for new nuclear power is only fractionally more than coal and with even a modest carbon tax, is cheaper than coal.
Another good example of public diplomacy is the
Such tightly written pieces are intended for the influencers, not “Joe the plumber”.
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