Power
Tony Blair made me cross anew a few days ago, announcing that were Labour to get in, he would open a “national debate” on the issue of nuclear power.
The problem runs thus: we need more electricity, but we also need to reduce CO2 emissions in order to get in line with the Kyoto protocol we rather agreed to. So clearly power stations which work by the principle of burning stuff are not a good idea.
This leaves us with two choices: get some of that much-vaunted renewable stuff, or go back to the sixties and embrace that panacea-we-already-saw-through, nuclear power.
This is an extremely difficult question, and poses vast numbers of problems all ’round; nuclear is expensive and potentially dangerous in terms of accidents, terrorists and waste disposal; renewables are expensive, inefficient and require vast areas of land. Who should we trust to weigh up the risks of this complex decision? Tony Blair evidently thinks the general public.
Now, I’m a physics student, and have studied this debate no fewer than five times in my academic career (in physics, chemistry, biology, DT and even English), and I don’t feel I’m in any position to make a judgement. The panicky general public, fed on a diet of disaster movies and political scaremongering, is utterly ill-equipped.
For example, “Nuclear power may not have the problems associated with carbon emissions, but it does produce tonnes of radioactive waste that costs billions to store and will pose a risk to humans for thousands of years after disposal,” explained Lib Dem environment spokesman Norman Baker. All true, but possibly misleading - does he know how big “tonnes” of nuclear waste is? Uranium weighs something like twenty tonnes per cubic metre - so five thousand such tonnes would just about fill a small swimming pool. And modern nuclear power stations don’t produce anything like that much waste.
I’m not attempting to illustrate that nuclear is a totally safe option just because the waste is small in volume - just that without a large amount of knowledge, a lot of the information presented is impossible to critically assimilate. I have no idea how dangerous it is in real terms standing next to a radioactive source emitting ten gamma photons and an alpha particle per minute…do you?
So, what’s the answer? The Institute of Physics think that we should seriously think about building a few nuclear plants, and simultaneously research renewables and nuclear fusion (an entirely different technology to current nuclear plants which is vastly more efficient and produces no radioactive waste…if we can ever get it to work). I’m willing to trust the IOP’s opinion on this one, on the basis that they are probably one of the best-qualified organisations to make such assertions.
So, another spanner into the political mess that is my opinions on the major parties. Labour and especially the Lib Dems lose out big time, and the Tories score a point, Tim Yeo (Conservative shadow environment secretary) saying that he found it hard to see how the problem of carbon emissions could be tackled if existing nuclear power stations could not be replaced.
And that’s if global warming isn’t just a climatic blip that we would be better off ignoring, anyway…
May 7th, 2005 at 12:00
In order to illustrate the reason nuclear power is, at present, essential to supplement renewables as a source of energy, I performed a back-of-the-envelope calculation about the amount of power able to be extracted from the air by a wind turbine.
So, every windmill generates something in the region of 50kW, it seems.
According to the MSN Encarta article on nuclear power, “1 kg of uranium-235 releases 18,700,000kWh” - the same amount of energy released by the wind turbine in 18.7×106/50 = 374,000 hours = 4 years!
An even more unfair comparison would be to suggest that 1kg of 235U contains some 200,000 times the energy of a kilo of air moving at 10ms-1.
The point of all this, however, is that a nuclear power station creates energy on a scale orders of magnitude higher than is even possible with wind turbines; the above calculation assumed that air hitting the turbine had all of its kinetic energy removed - and we don’t find a mass of stationary air behind windmills, in general! So, we need nuclear because one little power station can produce as much energy, according to EnergyAdvocate.com, as about 12,800 windmills: and that’s assuming that it’s very windy!
My final, and rather pointless, back-of-the-envelope calculation runs thus: did you know that a single chocolate digestive would power Germany for some 6.083μs?
I hope that this does not compel the government to investigate biscuit power…