Nuclear power is clean, safe, reliable, compact, competitive and practically
inexhaustible. Today over 400 nuclear reactors provide base-load electric power in 30
countries. Fifty years old, it is a relatively mature technology with the assurance of
great improvement in the next generation.
(Hundreds of nuclear reactors furnish reliable and flexible shipboard power: military
ships of course. But the technology is adaptable to civilian maritime transport.)
Clean: Nuclear energy produces almost no carbon dioxide, and no sulfur dioxide or
nitrogen oxides whatsoever. These gases are produced in vast quantities when fossil
fuels are burned.
Nuclear waste: One gram of uranium yields about as much energy as a ton of coal or
oil - it is the famous “factor of a million”. Nuclear waste is correspondingly about a
million times smaller than fossil fuel waste, and it is totally confined.
In the USA and Sweden, spent fuel is simply stored away. Elsewhere, spent fuel is
reprocessed to separate out the 3% of radioactive fission products and heavy elements
to be vitrified (cast in glass) for safe and permanent storage. The remaining 97% –