Now that President Barack Obama has called for the resumption of
the construction of commercial nuclear power plants, the following
information may answer some questions.
Now that President Barack Obama has called for the resumption of the construction of commercial nuclear power plants, the following information may answer some questions.
The process for producing electricity from a nuclear plant is exactly the same as any fossil plant burning coal, oil or gas:
n water is heated to boiling and steam is routed to a turbine;
n the turbine spins a generator and out comes electricity.
The only difference between a fossil plant and a nuclear plant is the source of heat to boil the water. In a nuclear plant, the source of heat is the splitting of a rare uranium atom (U-235) which occurs naturally in uranium ore at a concentration of only 0.7 percent. The U.S. government controls the enrichment of U-235 to higher concentrations in large cascades of centrifuges.
By U.S. law and United Nations agreements, nuclear power plants are limited to a maximum of 5 percent enrichment of U-235. With a 5 percent batch of nuclear fuel a power plant can operate for about two years without refueling. For comparison, the concentration of U-235 in a bomb is more than 90 percent, and it takes a lot of time, energy and technical knowledge to handle the U-235 isotope at that level.
With high reliability, the Navy has been using nuclear power plants in its ships and submarines since the mid-1950s.
As a side note, it is physically impossible for a nuclear power plant to “blow up” like a nuclear bomb due to its low level (5 percent) of uranium fuel enrichment. Most people don’t understand this. The physics simply will not support such an explosion. Three Mile Island was an accident wherein there was a loss of coolant in the boiler and the fuel overheated and melted. There was never a “nuclear explosion.” The various backup safety systems and multiple levels of barriers worked and no one was killed or got irradiated.
Compare that to the Russians who built a completely different design of reactor using solid graphite bricks. The West urged them to build more backup safety systems and, more importantly, another barrier or shield over the reactor. Western technology uses another building over the reactor called the Containment, and it is the Containment that prevented the Three Mile Island plant from being a worse accident.
The Three Mile Island accident was a vindication of the correctness of our conservative design philosophy – multiple safety systems and multiple levels of containment.
And remember this: even the accident at Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion. The Russians did not have a Containment Building over the reactor, and when fuel overheated it “blew off the top” and spewed radioactive fuel into the atmosphere.
As for nuclear waste, it’s a political issue and neither a technical nor a safety issue. President Ronald Reagan signed The Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1987 which established Yucca Mountain to be the nuclear waste repository. Since then, environmentalists and legislators have held up the disposal of spent nuclear fuel by requiring more studies. Yucca Mountain is the most studied mountain in history.
Spent nuclear fuel can be safely stored in stainless steel canisters welded shut and put into lead lined casks deep inside the middle of a mountain. Furthermore, the amount of nuclear waste is less than the waste from fossil plants. Look at the waste from strip coal mining, ash from coal burning plants, methane burned off at oil refineries, millions of tons of nitrates and sulfates from exhaust gasses, and millions of tons of CO2 going into the atmosphere contributing to global warming.
A resumption of the construction of nuclear power plants will provide:
n thousands of construction, operating and maintenance jobs;
n clean non-polluting electricity 24/7;
n reduction in the importation of oil from unstable countries;
n elimination of billions of dollars going overseas and destabilizing our economy;
n funding terrorists who kill American soldiers with our “oil money.”
I am in favor of installing solar panels and wind turbines wherever feasible.
But nuclear power is the only way to generate a large supply of clean non-polluting electricity that doesn’t depend on the amount of water in our reservoirs, sunshine, or wind.
Robert Benich, P.E. (retired), the former chairman of the Morgan Hill Planning Commission and a Veteran, U.S. Navy – Nuclear Submarine Service.
