Hydrogen Sources - Hydrogen and Fuel Cells: Advances in Transportation and Power - page 138

tics of fear. The problem of high-level nuclear waste has been mostly cre-
ated by government barriers to American fuel breeding and reprocessing.
Spent nuclear fuel can be recycled into new nuclear fuel.
Reactor accidents have been greatly publicized, but there has not been
one death associated with an American nuclear reactor accident. However
the dependence on automobiles results in more than 40,000 deaths each
year. All forms of energy generation, including alternatives like solar and
wind involve industrial deaths in the mining, manufacture, and transport
of materials they require. Nuclear energy requires the smallest amount of
resources and thus has the lowest risk of deaths.
Future developments in energy technology can alter the relative eco-
nomics of nuclear, hydrocarbon, solar, wind, and other methods of energy
generation. Conservation if practiced extensively as a replacement to hy-
drocarbon and nuclear power means a major step backward for our mod-
ern world.
The United States is paying more than $300 billion per year to pay for
foreign oil and gas. Energy production has surged abroad while domes-
tic production has stagnated. This is largely due to complex government
regulations and energy policies which have made the U.S. an unfavorable
place to produce energy. The repeal of this conglomerate of regulations,
tax incentives and subsidies to energy generation industries would do
much to foster energy development and allow a free competition to deter-
mine the best energy paths. Technological advances reduce cost, but usu-
ally not quickly. International rationing and taxation of energy has also
been proposed as energy policy.
Nuclear power can be safer, less expensive, and more environmen-
tal agreeable than hydrocarbon power. But solid, liquid and gaseous hy-
drocarbon fuels provide many conveniences and the infrastructure to use
them is already in place.
Oil from shale or coal liquefaction can be less expensive than crude
oil at current prices, but production costs are higher than developed oil
fields. There is an investment risk that crude oil prices could and then
liquefaction plants could not compete. Nuclear energy does not have this
disadvantage.
In the U.S. about 20% of the electric power is produced by 104 nu-
clear power reactors with an average output of almost 900 megawatts per
reactor or 93-GWe (gigawatts) total. If this were increased by 250-GWe,
nuclear power could fill all current U.S. electricity requirements.
If the heat from these additional nuclear reactors were used for coal