14 DAY TRIAL // Only a few decades ago, several European countries decided to ban nuclear power forever, because of the fears regarding radiation emissions and possible nuclear accidents that could literally render a whole city uninhabitable for a few million years. Today, however, greenhouse gases and increased power demand seem to turn the situation the other way around.
For example, out of the total power output in the United Kingdom, about 20 percent is generated in nuclear power plants, and all of them will be closed by the year 2023. Recently, the UK government decided to implement a program that would cut the greenhouse gas emission by over 60 percent by the year 2050. This causes a little problem. How to generate a fifth of the country's power, reducing the carbon dioxide emission and disabling the nuclear reactors at the same time?
Well, the problem is merely reduced to choosing between two bad things. How do you do such a thing? You choose the better of two, meaning the UK plans to build a new wave of nuclear power plants in order to satisfy the power demands. Nevertheless, the document received by the UK government is somehow like a white check; the proposal has been sent, but the permission for such actions is uncertain so far.
A similar proposal was previously forwarded in 2003, but the government rejected it because it did not answer the predicted energy consumptions at that time, thus had no justification to be built. There is no wander that nuclear power currently has a powerful comeback. The amount of electric energy produced by 'burning' nuclear fuel in relation to the carbon dioxide emissions during the same process easily surpasses the ratio obtained by burning fossil fuels. John Hutton, secretary of state for business, argues that the amount of carbon dioxide gas emitted by each nuclear power plant is comparable to that about a million households emit in the same amount of time.
Furthermore, Gregg Butler from the University of Manchester thinks that, because of the rejection of the project sent in 2003, the UK has lost valuable time in implementing the program. Even more, the Nuclear Energy Agency sent, last year, a warning saying there is a shortage in trained workers which could potentially build future nuclear power plants, therefore new workers would have to be recruited from the graduate engineers specialized in the nuclear sector.
Considering that the average time for building a new wave of nuclear power plants is estimated at about 10 years, Paul Howarth, director of research at the Dalton Nuclear Institute in Manchester, believes that there would be not enough time to replace the existing nuclear facilities with new ones, in order to meet the 2023 deadline.