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Question: Do you believe that nuclear energy could replace fossil fuels world wide?
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Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 5 Mar 2019:
I think it’s perfectly capable of achieving that but there’s so much that needs to be determined before hand. We need to secure the fuel supply first. Uranium is mined and therefore not a limitless resource, so we’d need to look into how to find other uranium deposits or use other fuel types like thorium or mixed oxide fuels. We need a solid plan for what to do with the waste once it’s treated and we’d need guarantees that politics wouldn’t change and suddenly decide to stop all nuclear power generation in a country (looking at you, Germany). We’d also need to consider whether every country is suitable to have a power plant, as some of them aren’t in good positions to build a plant which requires good water supplies and infrastructure. Then there’s the workforce to consider- the UK has an aging nuclear workforce, would there be enough specialist knowledge to keep an entire globes worth of power plants running smoothly? It’s a very complex question that goes beyond just the idea of nuclear being more energy dense than coal fired power plants
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Andy Buckley answered on 5 Mar 2019:
I think fossil fuels need to be replaced. Whether nuclear provides the replacement seems less obvious than 10 years ago, because the cost of nuclear has gone up so much (to put safety systems on top of safety systems on top of safety systems… and it was already the safest but people are scared) and the cost of renewables has come down. I think it’s now more likely that we’ll see something like a 50/50 mix of renewables/nuclear as the coal is eliminated and gas is phased out. A mixture will be needed since most renewables stop and start depending on weather or tides. In the long run it would be awesome to see clean, safe nuclear fusion become affordable and become an important part of the mix.
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George Fulton answered on 5 Mar 2019:
Nuclear fission has been around for around 60 years now, I’m not sure that it is going to receive a sudden resurgence in popularity in the next 10 years while accidents such as Fukashima are so fresh in our mind. Indeed, the UK is seeing nuclear power plants closing down and little investment is being given by the government into building new ones for the future. This is a real problem and the UK will suffer from an energy crisis in the future if this is not fixed.
Nuclear fusion power is probably the ultimate goal, it promises clean energy with a lot less of the nasty mess that nuclear fission provides. That being said, this is someway off and in the meantime use of other renewable energy types such as wind and tidal will be especially important for the UK.
Eventually fossil fuels will be replaced, but the drive to replace them isn’t purely an environmental one, they will only be finally phased out once the economics of renewables makes business sense.
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Emily commented on :
I think the solution to having to drop coal and gas because of climate change will probably be a combination of nuclear fission and renewables (and maybe nuclear fusion if it gets sorted in time).
Ideally we could just use wind and solar power but we haven’t sorted out a good way of storing energy so we would have none when it was calm/cloudy and loads would be wasted when it was windy/sunny.
However nuclear power is a tricky issue as the others have mentioned, it takes a long time for reactors to be built and they normally need government support so politics becomes a problem.
Then you also need strong safety systems in place and for the plant to make a profit, otherwise no company would want to run it.
Then on top of that we need a safe way of storing the waste produced.
So it could be a good solution to fossil fuels, as soon as we work out all of those problems…