Part 2 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
Nuclear Waste
Nuclear technology has been used to generate electricity through nuclear fission for over sixty years. Four hundred thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel are stored around the world. There is still no universally agreed upon method of disposal for spent fuel. Permanent disposal in underground facilities is one possible solution that is being explored as several sites. However, there are concerns that the dry casts made of concrete and steel to store the spent fuel may leak radioactive materials into the ground water or the environment via geological movement.
Accident rate
Up to the present, there have been eleven nuclear accidents that have involved full or partial meltdown of the reactor core. These accidents were not minor accidents that could have been avoided with improved safety technology. They were rare events that a not even possible to model in a system as complicated as a nuclear power plant. They arose from unforeseen pathways and unpredictable circumstances. Considering that these eleven accidents happened during a total of fourteen thousand reactor years of nuclear operations, scaling up to fifteen thousand nuclear reactors would mean that, on average, there would be a major accident somewhere in the world every month.
Proliferation
The more nuclear power plants that are put into operation, the greater the probability that nuclear materials and expertise for making nuclear weapons may proliferate. Although reactors have been constructed with proliferation resistance measures, maintaining accountability for fifteen thousand reactors sites spread around the world would be almost impossible.
Uranium abundance
At the current rate of uranium consumption with conventional commercial nuclear fusion reactors, the world’s supply of viable uranium would last for about eighty years. Scaling consumption up to fuel the generation of fifteen terawatts, the viable uranium supply would last for about five years. (Viable uranium is the uranium that exists in a high enough ore concentration so that mining and refining it is economically justified.)
Uranium extraction from seawater
Uranium is usually mined from the crust of the Earth but it can also be extracted from seawater. Seawater contains huge quantities of uranium at a concentration of three and three tenths parts per billion which adds up to ten trillion pounds. Theoretically, that amount of uranium would last for five thousand seven hundred years to supply fifteen terawatts of power. (Fast breeder reactors extends the use of uranium by a factor of sixty. With the use of fast breeder reactors to produce more fuel, the uranium could last for three hundred thousand years. However, Abbot says that these reactors’ complexity and cost would make them uncompetitive.) In addition, as uranium is extracted, the concentration in seawater would decrease. Greater and greater amounts of water would have to be processed to produce the same amount of uranium which would increase the expense. Abbott calculates that the volume of seawater that would have to be processed would become economically impractical in less than thirty years.
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