Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Finland. The UK nuclear programme has been plagued by a piecemeal
approach, building two types of UK-only reactors (Magnox and Advanced
Gas Cooled Reactors or AGRs) but with different and costly modifications
to every one of them, while the US nuclear industry suffered from being
too fragmented into small operating companies.
The economics of the nuclear industry became less competitive with
energy-market liberalization. The notion, especially in the US and the UK
in the 1980s and 1990s, that a country's energy mix should be established
by free competition between energy sources in the marketplace, appeared
to reveal the fundamental inability of nuclear power to survive without
government subsidy. The nuclear industry, which has to lay out several
billions of pounds, dollars or euros before a reactor can start earning its
keep, has found the market uncertainties created by energy-market liber-
alization hard to cope with.
Liberalization has had to cede ground in the face of the climate-change
challenge, which has itself given a whole new lease of life to - or at least
one new argument for - nuclear power. For nuclear power is the only
major source of carbon-free electricity with a proven record of power
generation on the scale required.
Even staunch opponents of nuclear concede that nuclear power gen-
eration is carbon-free, although they point out that the construction of
reactors inevitably involves substantial emissions - and that uranium
extraction itself has an environmental footprint.
The nuclear renaissance
Rebirth in the US
After some false dawns, it looks as though there is something of a nuclear
revival underway. After a 28-year period (1979-2007) in which there
was not a single US licence application for a new reactor, requests for 27
new reactors have been filed since 2007 with the US Nuclear Regulatory
Commission. Approval of the first of these licence requests is expected
some time between 2011 and 2012. And the industry, gearing up for new
construction, has hired some eighteen thousand extra people.
The only hiccup for the US nuclear industry is that the new president,
Barack Obama, has come out against the long-term project to make
Nevada's Yucca Mountain the final repository for civil nuclear waste. In
doing so, Obama is honouring a 2008 campaign pledge he made to win
