New Nukes

Any consideration of these energy alternatives may be futile, if, as is predicted, the Government choose to press ahead with a new nuclear programme anyway. So assuming new nuclear power stations are coming what exactly does the future hold for nuclear power?

In the aftermath of nuclear accidents such as the one in 1979 on Three Mile Island, USA, and then in 1986 in Chernobyl, Ukraine, all eyes are likely to be on safety. Indeed it's perhaps not surprising that in the last 20 years every US nuclear reactor scheduled for construction has subsequently been cancelled, despite the fact that accidents are relatively rare.

But now many nuclear proponents are pinning their hopes on a new breed of fission reactors that are smaller, safer and more self-contained. One example of this is the nuclear battery, a small power station that has virtually no moving parts and requires very little supervision.

In 2004, Galena, a small remote town in Alaska with dire energy needs, accepted an offer by Toshiba to build one of these reactors free of charge. Called the 4S (Super, Safe, Small and Simple) it measures just 20 metres long and will be buried in the ground. When it's eventually fired up in 2012 the plant will be capable of producing 10 megawatts of cheap power for 30 years before having to be refuelled.

And before the 4S has even been built, another type of smaller reactor has been proposed called a Rapid-L that would be just a few metres long but capable of providing enough electricity for an apartment block or a hospital.

But such plants would still produce highly radioactive spent fuel. So in the long-term we may hope to find ourselves switching to the clean nuclear alternative – fusion power. Old-style nuclear reactors, including 4S and Rapid-L, harvest energy that's released from the splitting of atoms. They are known as fission reactors. Fusion reactors, on the other hand, fuse atomic nuclei to form heavier atoms in a process that releases very large amounts of energy. It's the same process that fuels the sun.

Fusion is potentially cleaner and safer than fission because it produces no high-level nuclear waste. Also, because such small quantities of fuel would be used, an uncontrolled and dangerous release of energy would be much less of a threat than with fission reactors. What's more, the fuels, deuterium and tritium (stable hydrogen isotopes), are found naturally in water, of which there is a potentially inexhaustible supply readily available. In short, fusion could single-handedly solve most of our planet's energy needs.

However, we are still a long way off from making this happen. Despite more than half a century of research the first prototype will not be ready until 2015. This $10 billion project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, is being built in France, a country that currently has 58 nuclear reactors producing 84% of its electricity.

Even if powerful magnetic fields can successfully be used to contain the 100-million-degree Celsius plasma that's necessary to produce the fusion reactions, a commercial plant wouldn't be ready until 2048. In the meantime, it seems almost inevitable that countries like the UK will in the coming years become more reliant on traditional nuclear fission power plants.

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