Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the support of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority
leader, who opposes the plan to bury high-level atomic waste at Yucca.
But the US would hardly be the first country to start, or resume, building
reactors without knowing where the final burial site for their high-level
waste will be. Only Finland, as pointed out earlier, has made that decision.
(In fact, the US is already burying its military nuclear waste at a site in
New Mexico.)
Revival in the UK
The UK, which was the first country in the world to start up a commercial
nuclear reactor (in 1956), has nineteen reactors providing about twenty
percent of the country's electricity. But fourteen of them will have to shut
down before 2020, and probably all but one by 2023. The reason is a mix-
ture of age, inefficiency and unreliability.
Britain's remaining Magnox reactors started operation in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, and its AGR reactors began working in the late 1970s
and in the 1980s. Most of today's reactors in the world were originally
The dome containing the reactor at Sizewell B nuclear power station. The
UK's only commercial pressurized water reactor power station was built and
commissioned between 1987 and 1995.
