“Third Generation” Nuclear Reactors” safety, pollution, proliferation dangers
Why James Hansen is wrong on nuclear power | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, By Renfrey Clarke April 8, 2010 -“…….Third-generation reactors are in essence evolved versions of the pressurised-water installations that provide almost all of today’s nuclear energy. Now being built for the first time, “third-generation” plants are arguably still at the pre-commercial stage.
With a variety of “passive” safety features, designed to make them shut down without human intervention in the event of accidents, third- and fourth-generation reactors should in theory have an incidence of contained core meltdown in the one-in-millions-of-years range. But in third-generation installations, at least, other dangers and drawbacks of second-generation plants will persist.
Like their forbears, third-generation reactors require energy-hungry enrichment of their uranium fuel, and induce fission in only about 1 per cent of it. As the world’s limited reserves of high-grade uranium ores are used up, these inefficiencies will make the greenhouse abatement advantages of third-generation plants increasingly unimpressive.
Again like their precursors, third-generation reactors produce fiercely radioactive wastes that must be locked away from the environment for more than 100,000 years. Scores of thousands of tonnes of high-level waste are now in limited-term storage at reactor sites around the world.
Plutonium in the waste from third-generation reactors can be extracted and used to create nuclear weapons. A further danger is the possibility that ill-guarded waste could be stolen and used to make so-called dirty bombs, from which high explosives would disperse radioactive material.
When a technology is immature – as is the case with third-generation nuclear power generation – the time needed to make it fully operational is always an important question. And when the task is to replace fossil-fuelled energy generation, the timeframes for perfecting the new equipment and building it out are critically short…..
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