Over the recent past, nuclear powered energy production has prevented about 2.2 billion tonnes of CO2 from being added to the atmospheric load. Not a lot in relevant terms but a actual positive in an ever-growing energy requirement that has tipped the world into the Climate Change crises.
Tom Blees in his book \" Prescriptions for the Planet\" has examined in depth 3 key achievable solutions for the world to embrace if we collectively wish for a superior and fairer planet for us and future generations.
The initial is energy production, the use of Integral Rapidly Reactors to produce electricity. The second is the use of Plasma technologies for waste removal and the third is Boron powering technologies for vehicles. Setting aside the waste and vehicle problems for a different day, the energy creation is pressing.
Integrated Quick Reactors are technologically with us. They need to have a lot more development but the basics are in location for these units to produce about a Gigawat Year of electricity from a tonne of fuel. They make use of depleted uranium stocks currently in the world at some thing in the magnitude of 1.1 million tonnes and rising. These are in part the wastes from present generator plants that cause so a lot debate about storage and half-lives.
Well! These can be re-employed in IFR\'s to extract their latent energy, then they will be reduced to a fraction of their size and to a 300 year, much a lot more manageable, life cycle. The IFR\'s can also use other fuels such as thorium. By utilizing what is currently a issue for waste removal and transferring from fossil fuel to nuclear thus saving further climate alter impacts would appear to be sensible. There are stocks of fuel adequate to last a quite lengthy time using this technology.
There are two other technologies being employed or developed in the world, which are of superb importance.
The 1st is the extraction of uranium from waste coal residue or fly ash. Coal contains uranium, as does just about every thing, and right after use in a power plant the residue ends up as a waste product. In China the technology has been developed to extract the uranium from massive waste dumps and reuse it in existing nuclear generating plants.
We, that is Australia, exports millions of tonnes of Coal annually, all of which will eventually be available to the destination countries for uranium extraction with this process. I do not think all of the coal importing nations have signed uranium use protocols! Possibly a minor oversight, but extra likely a case of a blinkered view
The second process is the development in Japan of extraction of uranium from seawater. This is a completed method but is presently not cost efficient compared to terrestrial sources. It will be as the process is refined and other costs impact some mining processes. There is presently projected about 5.five million tonnes of known terrestrial uranium deposits around the world. Australia has about 23% of these known reserves.
Compare it to the oceans where there is calculated to be approx. four.62 billion tonnes of uranium. Permitting for energy usage four times our current global demand and by the use of IFR\'s it is reasonable to forecast that we will never run out of uranium to fuel our global energy requirement.
Whatever we take from the oceans and process will be replaced by the Earths geological capacity to create and leach the mineral. That makes nuclear power generation a renewable along with the sun, wind, geothermal and others and therefore fully sustainable.