The uranium liberated by one 1,000 MWe coal plant in one year
includes about 74 pounds of uranium-235 (U-235), enough for
two or more atomic bombs.

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission actually investigated using coal

as a source of uranium for nuclear weapons in the early 1950s when
richer ores were believed to be in short supply; burning the coal, the
AEC concluded, would concentrate the mineral, which could then be
extracted from the resulting coal ash. [Lehman (1996), p. 20, citing
Bisselle and Brown (1984).] Worldwide releases of uranium and thorium
from coal burning total about 37,300 tonnes (metric tons) annually.
The uranium liberated by one 1,000 MWe coal plant in
one year includes about 74 pounds of uranium-235 (U-235), enough for
two or more atomic bombs. [74 pounds: Gabbard (1993), p. 6. Critical
mass for a U235 sphere surrounded by a thick uranium tamper, 15 kg:
King > (1979),<

How much coal would I have to burn in my home coal fire to accumulate
the 15kg I need to make my own atom bomb to defend my home
against the Islamic Jihadis . I know it can be set off by forcing two
uranium balls together with dynamite.

On Mon, 04 Sep 2006 06:45:53 GMT, hi@anony (habshi) wrote:

. Uranium and
thorium,
mildly radioactive elements ubiquitous in the crust of the earth, are
both released when coal is burned. Radioactive radon gas, a decay
product of crustal uranium normally confined underground, is also
released when coal is mined. A 1,000 megawatt-electric (MWe)
coal-fired
power plant releases into the environment about one hundred times as
much radioactivity as a comparable nuclear plant. [Gabbard (1993), p.
7.] The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission actually investigated using coal
as a source of uranium for nuclear weapons in the early 1950s when
richer ores were believed to be in short supply; burning the coal, the
AEC concluded, would concentrate the mineral, which could then be
extracted from the resulting coal ash. [Lehman (1996), p. 20, citing
Bisselle and Brown (1984).] Worldwide releases of uranium and thorium
from coal burning total about 37,300 tonnes (metric tons) annually
(the
annual U.S. share of those releases is about 7,300 tonnes). [Alex
Gabbard, personal communication.] More radioactive heavy metal is
released into the environment every two years by coal burning than the
total spent fuel waiting to be buried from all U.S. nuclear power
production and most U.S. nuclear weapons production. [Calculated from
Lehman (1996), p. 141.] Since uranium and thorium are potent nuclear
fuels, burning coal also wastes more potential energy than it
produces.
[Gabbard (1993), p. 8.]

One potential and overlooked consequence of the concentration of
fissionable and fertile [3] minerals by coal burning is nuclear
proliferation. The uranium liberated by one 1,000 MWe coal plant in
one
year includes about 74 pounds of uranium-235 (U-235), enough for two
or
more atomic bombs. [74 pounds: Gabbard (1993), p. 6. Critical mass for
a U235 sphere surrounded by a thick uranium tamper, 15 kg: King
(1979),
p. 7.] The uranium would have to be enriched, which can be complicated
and expensive; an easier course to proliferation would be breeding
plutonium (Pu) from coal-derived uranium or fissile U-233 from
thorium.
Because electric utilities are not high-profile facilities, writes Oak
Ridge National Laboratory physicist Alex Gabbard, collection and
processing of coal ash for recovery of mineralscan proceed without
attracting outside attention, concern or intervention. Any country
with
coal-fired plants could collect combustion byproducts and amass
sufficient nuclear weapons materials to build up a very powerful
arsenal. [Gabbard (1993), p. 10.]

Nuclear utilities are required to invest in expensive systems designed
to limit releases of radioactivity; efficiently recycling nuclear fuel
was deferred indefinitely in the United States to set an example of
nonproliferation, changing the economics of nuclear power development
and creating a politically difficult waste disposal problem. If coal
utilities were forced to assume similar externality costs, coal
electricity would no longer be cheaper than nuclear.


The Decline and Fall of the Renewables

Renewable sources of energy hydroelectric [4] , solar, wind,
geothermal
and biomass have high capital investment requirements and significant,
if usually unacknowledged, environmental consequences. For most
renewables, the energy they collect is extremely dilute, requiring
large areas of land and masses of collectors to concentrate.
Manufacturing solar collectors, pouring concrete for fields of
windmills, drowning square miles of land behind dams damages and
pollutes.

Photovoltaic cells are large semiconductors; their processing produces
a highly toxic waste stream of metals and solvents that requires
special disposal technology. A 1,000 MWe solar electric plant using
photovoltaics would generate 6,850 tonnes of hazardous waste over a
thirty-year lifetime from metals finishing alone. A comparable solar
thermal plant (mirrors focussed on a central tower) would require
primary metals that would generate 435,000 tonnes of manufacturing
waste, of which 16,300 tonnes would be contaminated with lead and
chromium and considered hazardous. [Lehman (1996), pp. 53-54.]
Decentralized solar systems of comparable capacity would use an
equivalent volume of materials, but decentralization is hardly
feasible
for the megapolises of today and tomorrow. A global solar energy
system
would consume at least 20 percent of identified world iron resources.
It would require a century to build and a substantial fraction of
annual world iron production to maintain. The energy necessary to
manufacture sufficient solar collectors to cover a half-million square
miles of the earths surface and to deliver the electricity through
long-distance transmission systems would itself add grievously to the
global burden of pollution and greenhouse gas. [Cf. Weingart (1978).]
A
global solar energy system without fossil or nuclear backup would also
be hostage to solar radiation reductions from volcanic events such as
the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which caused widespread crop failure
during the year without a summer that followed. [Science 285 (5433):
1489 (3 Sept. 99)]

Wind farms, besides the waste stream resulting from manufacturing
their
millions of pounds of concrete and steel, their inefficiency, low
(because intermittent) capacity and visual and noise pollution, are
mighty slayers of birds. Several hundred birds of prey, including
dozens of golden eagles, are killed every year by a single California
wind farm; more eagles have been killed by wind turbines than were
lost
in the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill. The National Audubon Society
has launched a campaign to save the California condor from a proposed
wind farm to be built by Enron north of Los Angeles. A wind farm
equivalent in output and capacity to a 1,000 MWe fossil or nuclear
plant would occupy some 2,000 square miles of land, [Estimated from
NEI
(1999), p. 14 (quadruple 150,000 acres).] and even with substantial
subsidies and uncharged pollution externalities would produce
electricity at double or triple the cost of fossil fuels. [Bradley
(1997), p. 8.] Hydroelectric power dams which submerge large areas of
land, displace rural populations, change river ecology, kill fish and
raise concerns of catastrophic failure has lost its environmental
constituency in recent years. The U.S. Export-Import Bank was
responding in part to environmental lobbying when it denied funding to
the PRCs 18,000 MW Three Gorges project. [Bradley (1997), p. 21,
citing
the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.] At least one quarter
of the world potential for hydropower has already been developed.
Geothermal sources are inherently limited, and often coincide with
scenic sites (such as Yellowstone National Park) that conservationists
understandably desire to preserve.

Because of these and other disadvantages, organizations such as the
World Energy Council and the IEA predict that hydroelectric generation
will continue to account for no more than its present 6.9 percent
share
of world primary energy supply, while nonhydro renewables, even
robustly subsidized, will move from their present 0.5 percent share to
claim no more than 5 to 8 percent by 2020. [IAEA (1997), p. 10.] In
the
United States, which leads the world in renewable energy generation,
utility renewable generation declined by 9.4 percent from 1997 to
1998:
hydro decreased 9.2 percent, geothermal decreased 5.4 percent, wind
decreased 50.5 percent, and solar decreased 27.7 percent. [Data from
DOE/EIA database, Annual Utility Electric Production Report 1998.]

The vision of a world run on pristine energy generated from renewables
which, like controlled thermonuclear fusion, recede as practical
sources despite expensively subsidized R&D always twenty years down
the
road has romanticized a far less realistic technological exuberance
among environmental activists than that of which they have long
accused
advocates of nuclear power. Along the way, the public investment in
renewables might have been spent making coal plants and automobiles
cleaner. The 1997 U.S. Federal R&D investment per thousand
kilowatt-hours, for example, was only $0.05 for nuclear and coal,
$0.58
for oil, $0.41 for gas but $4,769 for wind and $17,006 for
photovoltaics. [EIA, cited in NEI (1999), p. 15.] While nuclear power
avoided millions of tons of air pollutants and greenhouse gases, The
$5.8 billion spent by the [U.S.] Department of Energy on wind and
solar
subsidies over the last 20 years is the financial equivalent of
replacing between 5,000 and 10,000 MW of the nations dirtiest coal
capacity with gas-fired combined-cycle units, which would have reduced
carbon dioxide emissions between one-third and two-thirds, Robert L.
Bradley, Jr., of Houstons Institute for Energy Research estimates.
[Bradley (1997), p. 67, n. 305.] Replacing coal with nuclear
generation
would have reduced overall emissions even more. Conservation has also
been heavily subsidized, making saved power twice as expensive in the
U.S. as generated power. [Bradley (1997), citing the EIA.] Overall, by
Bradleys estimate, U.S. conservation efforts and nonhydro renewables
have benefitted from a cumulative twenty-year taxpayer investment of
some $30-$40 billion, the largest governmental peacetime energy
expenditure in U.S. history. [Bradley (1997), p. 4.]

Despite such investment, conservation and nonhydro renewables remain
stubbornly uncompetitive and contribute only marginally to U.S.
energy.
If the most prosperous nation in the world cannot afford them, what
nation can? Not the PRC, evidently, which expects to generate less
than
one percent of its commercial energy from nonhydro renewables by 2025,
while increasing its installed nuclear capacity from 2.1 gigawatts
today to 30 to 40 GW and its hydroelectric from 32 GW to 138 GW. But
coal and oil will account for the bulk of the PRC energy supply in
2025
unless the example of the developed countries and suitable incentives
convince that populous nation to change its plans. Such example has
not
been forthcoming: Chinese per capita CO2 emissions even burning much
more coal and oil are expected to increase from 0.55 tonnes to 2.0
tonnes by 2025, which would still be only half the current level in
the
United States. For a projected PRC population of 1.5 billion, such an
increase will nevertheless result in an additional 2.5 billion tonnes
per year of CO2 by 2025, along with all the other accompanying
emissions. [PRC estimates: Drennen and Erickson (1998).]


Volumes of Energy

Natural gas has many virtues as a fuel compared to coal or oil, and
its
increasing share of world primary energy across the first half of the
21st century is assured. But its supply is limited and unevenly
distributed; it is expensive as a power source compared to coal or
uranium; it has higher value as a feedstock for materials and as a
substitute for petroleum in transportation, particularly for fuel
cells; and it pollutes the air. Natural gas fires and explosions are
significant risks and an uncounted externality. A single mile of gas
pipeline three feet in diameter at 1,000 psi pressure contains the
equivalent of two-thirds of a kiloton of explosive energy; a million
miles of such large pipelines lace the earth. A 1,000 MWe natural gas
plant releases 5.5 tonnes per day of sulfur oxides, 21 tonnes per day
of nitrogen oxides, 1.6 tonnes per day of carbon monoxide and 0.9
tonnes per day of particulates. U.S. annual discharges in 1994
generating energy from natural gas totaled about 5.5 billion tonnes.
[Lehman (1996), p. 32.]

The great advantage of nuclear power is its ability to wrest enormous
energy from a small volume of fuel. Nuclear fission, transforming
matter directly into energy, is several million times as energetic as
chemical burning, which merely breaks chemical bonds. One tonne of
nuclear fuel produces energy equivalent to two to three million tonnes
of fossil fuel. [Suzuki (1993), cited in Lehman (1996), p. 138.]
Burning 1 kilogram of firewood can generate 1 kilowatt hour of
electricity; 1 kg of coal, 3 kWh; 1 kg of oil, 4 kWh. But 1 kg of
uranium fuel in a modern lightwater reactor generates 400,000 kWh of
electricity, and if that uranium is recycled for maximum burnup, 1 kg
can generate more than 7,000,000 kWh. These spectacular differences in
volume of fuel per unit of energy produced largely determine the
differing environmental impacts of nuclear versus fossil fuels from
mining or extraction, through transportation, to environmental
releases
and the disposal of waste. Generating 1,000 MW of electricity for a
year requires 2,000 train cars of coal or 10 supertankers of oil, but
only one 10 cubic-meter fuel assembly of uranium. [IAEA (1997), P.
32.]
Out the other end of such fossil fuel plants even with abatement
systems operating come thousands of tonnes of noxious gases,
particulates and heavy-metal-bearing (and radioactive) ash plus solid
hazardous waste: up to 500,000 tonnes of sulfur if coal, more than
300,000 tonnes if oil and 200,000 tonnes if natural gas. In contrast,
a
1,000 MWe nuclear plant releases annually no noxious gases or other
pollutants, [5] and trace radioactivity many times less per person
than
airline travel, a home smoke detector or a television set. It produces
about 30 tonnes of high-level waste (spent fuel) and 800 tonnes of
low-
and intermediate-level waste about 20 cubic meters in all when
compacted (roughly, the volume of two passenger cars). [6] [IAEA
(1997), pp. 32-34.]

The high-level waste is intensely radioactive, of course (the
low-level
waste can be less radioactive than coal fly ash, which is used to make
concrete and gypsum incorporated into building materials), but its
small volume and the significant fact that it has not been released
into the environment allow its meticulous sequestration behind
multiple
barriers. Toxic wastes from coal, dispersed across the landscape in
coal smoke or buried near the surface, retain their toxicity forever.
Radioactive nuclear waste decays steadily, losing 99 percent of its
toxicity after 600 years well within the range of human experience
with
custody and maintenance, as evidenced by structures such as the Roman
Pantheon and Notre Dame cathedral. Nuclear waste disposal is a
political problem in the United States because of widespread nuclear
fear disproportionate to the reality of relative risk, but it is not
an
engineering problem, as advanced projects in France, Sweden and Japan
demonstrate. The World Health Organization has estimated that indoor
and outdoor air pollution causes some three million deaths per year.
[IAEA (1997), pp. 22-23.] Substituting small, sequestered volumes of
nuclear waste for vast, dispersed volumes of toxic wastes from fossil
fuels would be an improvement in public health so obvious that we are
astonished that physicians throughout the world have not demanded such
a conversion.

Nuclear electricity generated from existing U.S. plants is fully
competitive with electricity from fossil fuels, but new nuclear power
is somewhat more expensive. Large nuclear power plants require larger
capital investments than comparable coal or gas plants. They do so
because nuclear utilities are required to build and maintain costly
systems to sequester their radioactivity from the environment. If
fossil fuel plants were similarly required to sequester the pollutants
they generate, they would cost significantly more than nuclear power
plants do. The European Union has calculated externality costs for
complete energy chains (mining, transportation, operation and disposal
of waste). For equivalent amounts of energy generation, the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) summarizes the EU
calculations, the coal and oil plants assessed, owing to their large
emissions and huge fuel and transport requirements, have the highest
externality costs as well as equivalent lives lost. The external costs
are some ten times higher than for a nuclear power plant and can be a
significant fraction of generation costs. [IAEA (1997), p. 44.] Thus
coal externalities, properly accounted, cost 15 Ecu per kWh; oil, 12;
gas, 0.6; nuclear, 0.4. In equivalent lives lost per gigawatt
generated
annually (that is, loss of life expectancy from human exposure to
pollutants), coal kills 37; oil, 32; gas, 2; nuclear, 1. [IAEA (1997),
table 4, p. 44.] Compared to nuclear power, in other words, fossil
fuels (and renewables) have enjoyed a free ride with respect to
protection of the environment and public health and safety.

Even one annual equivalent life lost to nuclear power externalities is
questionable, however. Such an estimate of loss of life expectancy
depends on whether or not exposure to amounts of radiation
considerably
less than the natural radiation background less even than the normal
variations in background encountered during airline travel or living
at
different altitudes increases the risk of cancer. Despite the
longstanding linear no-threshold theory (LNT) that dictates elaborate
and expensive confinement regimes for nuclear power operations and
waste disposal, there is no evidence that low-level radiation exposure
increases cancer risk and good evidence that it does not. There is
even
good evidence that exposure to low doses of radioactivity improves
health and lengthens life, probably by stimulating the immune system
much as vaccines do (the best study, of background radon levels in
hundreds of thousands of homes in more than 90 percent of U.S.
counties, found lung cancer rates decreasing significantly with
increasing radon levels among both smokers and nonsmokers). [Cohen
(1998b).] Based on this evidence, low-level radioactivity from nuclear
power generation presents at worst a negligible risk. Authorities on
coal geology and engineering make the same argument about low-level
radioactivity from coal burning; a U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet,
for example, concludes that radioactive elements in coal and fly ash
should not be sources of alarm. [USGS (1997), p. 4.] But nuclear power
development has been hobbled, and nuclear waste disposal unnecessarily
delayed, by LNT-derived radioactivity limits not visited upon the coal
industry.

Industrial accident the Chernobyl disaster in particular is another
kind of risk which has generated disproportionate public concern. The
Chernobyl explosion followed from a fundamentally faulty reactor
design
which could not have been licensed in the West. Locally it caused a
human and environmental disaster, including 31 deaths, most from
severe
radiation exposure. Thyroid cancer, which could have been prevented
with prompt iodine prophylaxis, has increased in Ukrainian children
exposed to fallout. More than eight hundred cases have occurred, and
several thousand are projected; although the disease is treatable,
three children have died. LNT calculations (if credited) project 3,420
excess longterm cancer deaths in Chernobyl area residents and cleanup
crews. [IAEA (1997), Table 1, p. 25.] No technological system is
immune
from accident, but these numbers for the worst possible nuclear power
accident are remarkably low compared to major accidents in other
industries. Recent dam failures in Italy and India each resulted in
several thousand fatalities. Coal mine accidents, oil and gas industry
fires and pipeline explosions typically kill hundreds per incident.
The
1984 Bhopal chemical plant disaster caused some three thousand prompt
deaths and severely damaged the health of several hundred thousand
people. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, between
1987 and 1996 there were more than 600,000 accidental releases of
toxic
chemicals in the U.S. that killed a total of 2,565 people and caused
22,949 injuries. [Cited in Grossman (1999).] The Chernobyl reactor
lacked a containment structure, a fundamental safety system that is
required on Western reactors. Post-accident calculations indicate that
such a structure would have confined the explosion and thus the
radioactivity, in which case no injuries or deaths would have
occurred.
[Cohen (1998)] More than forty years of commercial nuclear power
operations demonstrate that nuclear power is much safer than fossil
fuel systems in terms of industrial accidents, environmental damage,
health effects and longterm risk.


Deferred Solutions

Most of the uranium in nuclear fuel assemblies is inert, a nonfissile
product unavailable for energy generation. Reactor operation, however,
breeds fissile plutonium and higher actinides in this uranium matrix
in
a 1,000 MWe nuclear power plant, about 0.2-0.3 tonnes per year, the
energy equivalent of some 1 million tonnes of coal. Because plutonium
is easier than U-235 to separate from natural uranium, the
commercialization of nuclear power has raised concerns about nuclear
weapons proliferation. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter deferred
indefinitely the recycling of nuclear spent fuel, citing proliferation
risks, which effectively ended that development in the U.S. even
though
such recycling reduces the volume and radiotoxicity of nuclear waste
and could extend nuclear fuel supplies for thousands of years. Other
nations assessed proliferation risks differently, however, and the
majority did not follow the U.S. example. France and the UK currently
reprocess spent fuel; Russia is stockpiling fuel and separated Pu for
jump-starting future fast-reactor fuel cycles; Japan has begun using
recycled mixed-oxide (uranium and plutonium, MOX) fuel in its
reactors.
[Japan: Nuclear News, Aug. 99, p. 116.] Japans electric power
development council also recently approved the construction of a new
nuclear power plant to use 100-percent MOX fuel beginning in 2007.
[Uranium Institute News Briefing 99.32, 4-10 Aug 99
(http://www.uilondon.org/ nb/nb99/ latestnews.htm).]

Although power-reactor plutonium can theoretically be used to make
nuclear explosives, spent fuel is refractory and highly radioactive,
beyond the capacity of terrorists to process; weapons made from
reactor-grade plutonium would be hot, unstable and of uncertain yield.
No nation has chosen to follow this route to build a nuclear arsenal,
nor is any likely to do so. Commercially viable [nuclear power]
plantsare large and visible, comments former U.S. Undersecretary of
Energy A. David Rossin. Their customers visit them. International
inspectors verify their safeguards. It would be a treaty violation and
a national disaster if any attempt were made to divert commercially
separated plutonium. It would really be a huge risk, even for a
desperate nation, to be caught in a diversion attempt before it could
build a credible nuclear arsenal. [Rossin (n.d.), p. 13.] The risk of
proliferation, the IAEA has concluded, is not zero and would not
become
zero even if nuclear power ceased to exist. It is a continually
strengthened nonproliferation regime that will remain the cornerstone
of efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.[IAEA (1997), p.
30.]

Ironically, burying spent fuel without extracting its plutonium
through
reprocessing would actually increase the longterm risk of nuclear
proliferation, since the intensely radioactive fission products that
serve as a barrier to diversion (the spent fuel standard) decay
significantly in a century or less, and the decay of the less fissile
and more radioactive isotopes in spent fuel after one to three
centuries improves the nuclear explosive properties of the Pu the
spent
fuel contains. Besides extending the worlds uranium resources almost
indefinitely, a closed nuclear fuel cycle makes it possible to convert
plutonium to useful energy while breaking it down into more
short-lived, nonfissionable nuclear waste.

Hundreds of tons of weapons plutonium which cost the nuclear
superpowers billions of dollars or rubles to produce have become
military surplus in the past decade. Rather than bury some of this
strategically threatening but energetically valuable material, as the
U.S. has proposed, it also should be recycled into nuclear fuel. An
integrated international fuel cycle management system would prevent
covert proliferation. As envisioned by Edward D. Arthur, Paul T.
Cunningham and Richard L. Wagner, Jr., of the Los Alamos National
Laboratory, such a system would combine internationally monitored
retrievable storage, processing of all separated plutonium into MOX
fuel for power reactors and, in the longer term, advanced integrated
materials-processing reactors that would receive, control and fission
all fuel discharged from reactors throughout the world, generating
electricity and reducing spent fuel to short-lived nuclear waste ready
for permanent geologic storage. [Arthur et al. (1998).]


New Designs and Technologies

A new generation of small, modular power plants designed for inherent
safety, proliferation resistance and ease of operation, manufactured
rather than constructed and competitive with natural gas, will be
necessary to extend the benefits of nuclear power to smaller
developing
countries that lack nuclear infrastructure. The U. S. DOE has awarded
funding to three designs for such fourth-generation plants. A South
African utility, Eskom, has announced plans to market a modular
gas-cooled pebble-bed reactor with natural safety which does not
require emergency core cooling systems and physically cannot melt
down.
Eskom estimates that the reactor will produce electricity at 1.4 cents
per kWh, which is cheaper than electricity from a combined-cycle gas
plant. [DOE: Magwood (1999), p. 4. South African utility: Kadak
(1999a,
1999b).]

The internal combustion engine has been refined to its limit; further
reductions in transportation pollution can only come from moving on
from petroleum to develop nonpolluting power systems for cars and
trucks. Recharging batteries for electric cars will simply transfer
pollution from mobile to centralized sources unless the centralized
source is nuclear. Fuel cells, which approach commercialization, may
be
a better solution. Because fuel cells generate electricity directly
from gaseous or liquid fuels, they can be refueled along the way much
as present internal combustion engines are. When operated on pure
hydrogen, they produce only water as a waste product. Hydrogen can be
generated from water using heat or electricity, suggesting an ultimate
nonpolluting energy infrastructure of hydrogen for transportation
generated by nuclear power, and nuclear electricity and process heat
for everything else. Such a major commitment to nuclear power could
not
only halt but eventually even reverse the continuing buildup of
anthropogenic carbon in the atmosphere. In the meantime, fuel cells
using natural gas could significantly reduce air pollution. Nuclear
power can also supply process heat for desalinization, which could
alleviate the water shortages predicted for the hotter and
climatically
changed decades to come.

The Royal Society and Royal Academy report proposes the formation of
an
international body funded by contributions from individual nations on
the basis of GDP or total national energy consumption. The body would
be a funding agency supporting research, development and demonstrators
elsewhere, not a research center itself. Its budget might build to an
annual level of some $25 billion, roughly one percent of the total
global energy budget. [Royal Society and Royal Academy (1999), pp.
2-3.] We would encourage this body to focus on the nuclear option, on
establishing a secure international nuclear fuel storage and
reprocessing system and on providing expertise for siting, financing
and licensing modular nuclear power systems for developing nations.

The share of final energy supplied by electricity is growing rapidly
in
most countries and worldwide, three analysts examining the dynamics of
energy technologies reported in 1999. [Grbler et al. (1999), p. 265.]
This development parallels the historic decarbonization of dominant
fuels from coal (dominant from 1880 to 1950, with one hydrogen atom
per
carbon atom) to oil (dominant from 1950 to today, with two hydrogen
atoms per carbon atom). Natural gas (four hydrogen to one carbon) is
rapidly increasing its market share, but nuclear fission produces no
carbon at all.

It is these facts of physical reality and common sense, not arguments
about corporate greed, central versus distributed systems of power
generation, hypothetical risks, radiation exposure or waste disposal
that ought to support decisions vital to the future of the human
world.
Despite its outstanding record, nuclear power has instead been
relegated by its opponents to the same twilight zone of contentious
ideological conflict as abortion and evolution. It deserves better. It
is environmentally ameliorative, practical and affordable. It is not
the problem but one of the best solutions.

REFERENCES

Arthur, E. D., Paul T. Cunningham and Richard L. Wagner, Jr. (1998).
An
architecture for nuclear energy in the 21st century. Santa Fe NM:
Santa
Fe Energy Seminar.

Bisselle, C. A., and R. D. Brown (1984). Radionuclides in U.S. Coals.
MTR-83W234, Mitre Corporation for U.S. DOE Contract No.
DE-Ac01-80ET13800. Cited in Lehman (1996).

Bradley, J., Robert L. (1997). Renewable energy: not cheap, not
"green", Cato Institute. Cato Policy Analysis 280
(www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-280.html).

Cohen, B. L. (1998a). Perspectives on the high level waste disposal
problem. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 23(3): 193-203.

Cohen, B. L. (1998b). Validity of the linear no-threshold theory of
radiation carcinogenesis at low doses. Uranium Institute Twenty-Third
Annual International Symposium (10-11 September), London.
(www.uilondon.org/sym/1998/cohen.htm.)

Drennen, T. E., and Jon D. Erickson (1998). Who will fuel China?
Science 279(6 March): 1483.

EIA (1997). International Energy Annual 1997 Overview. Department of
Energy: (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/ ide/ overview.html).

Gabbard, A. (1993). Coal combustion: nuclear resource or danger? ORNL
Review 26(3-4): 24-33.

Grossman, W.M. (1999). When publishing could mean perishing.
Scientific
Amer