Image: bigod/Flickr.com

The next nukes

December 8th, 2009 by Gene

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Nuclear energy has been in the doghouse for decades. But now it’s getting another look from policy-makers. We’ll look, too. Today, on Engineering Works!

People in the United States have always been a little skittish about nuclear energy. Accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in Ukraine didn’t help. Construction on the most recent nuclear power plant was started in 1977, and it didn’t go online until 1996.

Then came climate change, and environmental policy-makers took another look at nuclear energy. Unlike coal-fired power plants, nuclear plants produce no carbon dioxide and – get this – even less radiation than coal-fired power plants.

Engineers are working on designs for new reactors that they say should be simpler and safer than existing reactors, and should even deal with nuclear waste. The spent fuel should be a two-fer, the engineers say. Recycle it into new fuel that could go back into the reactor. This reduces the amount of waste we have to store. The technology to do this already exists, and what we now call spent fuel still has about 95 percent of its energy.

New reactors should be safer, with fewer ways operators could accidentally cause something to go wrong. And more automatic safeguards against accidents, like cooling systems that rely less on pumps and more on gravity to keep coolant where it needs to be for safe operation.

Our power plant is humming along, and we’re done. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu