Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
These copper “coffins” will be the final resting place for Finland's uranium rods.
They are thick enough to resist corrosion for many hundred thousand years.
at the bottom. The actual nuclear fuel rods will be placed in corrosion-
resistant copper canisters, of a thickness designed to secure the waste for
hundreds of thousands of years.
The US is exploring different security technologies at its Yucca
Mountain site. Meanwhile, in Finland as everywhere else, nuclear waste
is still piling up in temporary storage beside the reactors that produced it.
“Too cheap to meter!”
The second most troubling question about nuclear power is its econom-
ics. Nuclear power is the only energy technology that seems to have
become more, not less, expensive over time. The energy company EDF
estimates its latest reactors will cost €4-5bn. How different this is from
the 1950s when, in the nuclear industry's first flush of enthusiasm, it was
thought that nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter” and that it
would inevitably undercut other forms of electricity generation.
In reactor building, France achieved some economies of scale by going
for standardized designs in its crash reactor-building programme in the
late 1970s and 1980s. But even the French are still facing a big cost over-
run on the first-of-a-kind Generation 3 reactor that they are building in
