The Futility of Nuclear Energy
A factor of 10 cost escalations are not uncommon when building a nuclear power station. They take 1.6 million tonnes of steel and 14 million tonnes of cement for each power station. 500 to 1000 acres. If the UK wants to continue supplying 20% of our electricity then we will have to build 10 new reactors.
The uranium has to be mined and milled. Each power station will need 16 million tonnes of rock to be mined per year. Sulphuric acid is the primary leaching agent to make yellowcake which then has to be separated into the various metals at a later date. The clearing up of the mining process needs four times the extraction energy to clean up the acidic and radioactive waste, according to Ceedata, and is not usually done. Ceedata says that it would take thirty times the energy to extract the uranium than it will ever generate, thus proving that we only have nuclear power stations in order to make nuclear weapons. U 235 is separated from U238, the latter is called depleted uranium and needs to be disposed of safely, instead it is stored on land. The US has 500,000 tonnes of depleted uranium in cool storage to prevent it becoming gas. Enrichment plants are highly toxic. Half a tonne of fluorine is used to turn one tonne of uranium into uranium hexafluoride. The global warming potential of fluorine and its halogenated compounds is nearly 10,000 times that of CO2. Pollution from the plants finds it’s way into our rivers. Radiation leaks also happen at the power stations, leading to more cancer patients.
5,000 years ago the English Channel did not exist, so where are we going to bury our nuclear waste for a million years? It is estimated to cost £100 million to decommission the Windscale gas cooled reactor nuclear. The project cost of a 3.5 MW Enercon E126 EP 3 wind turbine costs £3.13 million and we could have 32 of them for this kind of money.
Taken from The Ecologist June 2006
