Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
ciency reduce waste and the new generations of nuclear reactors have state-of-the-art
safety precautions built in. However, as the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and the Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011 show, nuclear plants are still not safe, being vulnerable to
human error and natural disasters. The advantages of nuclear power, however, are that it is
reliable and can provide the required base load in the energy mix, and it is technology that
is already available and already thoroughly tested.
Nuclear fusion . This is the generation of energy that is found when two smaller atoms are
fused together. It occurs in our Sun and every other star. The idea is that the heavy form of
hydrogen found in sea water can be combined and the only waste product is the non-ra-
dioactive gas, helium. The problem, of course, is persuading those two atoms to join to-
gether. The Sun does it by subjecting the atoms to incredibly high temperatures and pres-
sures. Some advances have been made at the Joint European Torus (JET) project in the
UK, which has produced 16 megawatts of fusion power. The problem is the amount of en-
ergy required to generate the huge temperatures in the first place and the difficulty of scal-
ing it up to a power plant size.
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