Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
power,
which is available all of the time. There is more to
this than being able to watch your favorite television show
at any hour of the day or night. Traf
c lights, hospitals,
airports, your home refrigerator, among many other
things must all function
hours a day.
Nuclear power is the only large-scale carbon-free
system that now can produce this base-load power.
Expanding it to double the percentage of world electricity
that it supplies today requires the deployment of about
large new nuclear plants worldwide by
. With
them, we could avoid the emission of about
billion tons
of carbon per year. The United States has gotten stuck on
the issue of safe disposal of radioactive waste. That is a
political problem, not a technical one, but the political
problem may delay the construction of more nuclear
plants beyond the four that are now under construction.
If so, it will be much harder to reach the necessary green-
house gas reduction targets that are being discussed.
In Europe outside France, opposition to nuclear power
had been softening until Fukushima. However, a new
reactor is under construction in Finland; the United
Kingdom has said that nuclear power will be part of its
energy future; Sweden has decided not to phase out
nuclear energy; and several new reactors are under dis-
cussion for Eastern Europe. In Europe it is only Germany
and the Netherlands that have decided to phase out
nuclear energy.
A special word on the US role in nuclear power is in
order. The United States was once the world leader in
nuclear energy. It still has the largest number of power
reactors (
.
) followed by France (
). Its reactors supply
% of its electricity, but since the time of the Three Mile
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