TIME: Nuclear Energy Is Largely Safe. But Can It Be Cheap? [View all]

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[div style="float: left; margin-right: 12px;"]"Is it safe? That’s what most people — brought up on Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and The Simpsons — want to know about nuclear power. And for the most part, the answer is yes. Accidents are rare, and those that have occurred — including the partial meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011 — have resulted in few deaths. On a megawatt-per-megawatt basis, nuclear kills fewer people than almost any other source of electricity — especially compared with air pollution from coal, the single biggest supplier of electricity in the U.S., which contributes to the deaths of 14,000 Americans each year. And nuclear energy, unlike every other form of electricity — save hydro and renewables, doesn’t contribute to man-made climate change.

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The key, suggests the Breakthrough Institute in a new report, is the development of entirely new reactor designs, ones that can employ modular, mass-produced components with inherent safety characteristics that eliminate the need for the expensive backup systems that have helped inflate the costs of new plants in the past. (One of the think tank’s co-founders, Michael Shellenberger, appears in a new pronuclear documentary, Pandora’s Promise — I reviewed it here.) Current nuclear designs require — correctly — layer after layer of backups and safety systems to prevent meltdown in the event of a loss of power. (We call it a meltdown for a reason — if a current nuclear plant loses power, as the Fukushima Daiichi plant did after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, it can lose the ability to control the escalating temperature of nuclear fuel, which can lead to explosions and the release of radioactivity.) That means battery-powered backup systems and other fail-safes, all of which add to the bill. Reactors with passive safety systems are likely to be cheaper — as well as safer, since there would be no need to worry if power couldn’t be restored to the plant quickly in the event of disaster.

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According to statistics from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, between 1993 and 2002, carbon-free sources — meaning nuclear, hydro and renewables — made up 19% of total increase in global energy consumption. Between 2003 and ’12, as the rate of global energy consumption doubled, carbon-free sources made up only 14% of that increase. (Hat tip to Roger Pielke Jr. for pointing out these trends.) Despite the very rapid increases in renewables like wind and solar over the past decade — albeit from a very tiny beginning — we are losing the war to decarbonize our energy supply. I think nuclear can play a significant role in decarbonization, but it will only happen if atomic power isn’t expensive — all the more so given that most of the increase in global energy consumption will be coming in developing countries that are especially price sensitive. Pass the molten salt."

http://science.time.com/2013/07/08/nuclear-energy-is-largely-safe-but-can-it-be-cheap/