why we don’t rely on nuclear power plants more, especially these days
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Several very good reasons:
First, expense. Nuclear power plants are expensive to build and expensive to operate. They require a tremendous amount of up-front investment which can take years to pay off
Second, safety. Even if everything goes according to plan, nuclear power produces waste which has to be managed for *millennia*, and plenty of the rest of the facility is turned into low-level radioactive waste which must be carefully managed and disposed of. In the entire history of nuclear power, 700 reactors have been shut down, but only 25 have been returned to “greenfield” status, which means they’re usable for other purposes. And for the long-lived fission products, they’re so vexing, the industry can’t deliver the political will to authorize a long-term store, and it’s all a giant game of ‘radioactive potato’.
And then there’s the chance of disaster. To be sure, the overall safety record of nuclear power is far better than fossil fuel energy, but no oil or gas disaster has the power to functionally wipe places off the map for decades, if not centuries. Fukushima’s exclusion zone will be around long after the plant operators are dead and buried, and Chernobyl will be unsafe for human habitation for several generations.
Third, lack of scale. Even if you could snap your fingers tomorrow and make the first two sets of problems vanish, it still wouldn’t get around the big one: There just isn’t enough fissionable material available to scale up nuclear power, according to the NEA’s estimates of supplies of economically accessible uranium. We go through about 70,000 metric tons of raw uranium per year, we have about 5.5 million metric tons of identified uranium sources, and they estimate another 10.5 million metric tons as yet discovered, which will give us enough uranium to last for about 230 years at current scale.
And before someone mentions seawater extraction, I’d just like to point out that we don’t yet find extracting *water* from seawater economically viable in chronically drought-stricken areas. Uranium occurs in seawater at 3.3 parts per billion. I trust I don’t need to explain that math to you.
Believe me, the energy industry isn’t stupid. If they could make money building nuclear power plants, they would be doing it. They’re not. They’re sucking up subsidies and grant money to research technologies, and have been steadily doing so with no economically viable results for over 50 years.
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