Abstract
Because uranium and plutonium are also sources for nuclear weapons, a lot of public concern has been expressed about the danger these materials might pose if they were clandestinely diverted from use in civilian nuclear power plants to more sinister applications. These concerns are the true motives behind many who want to abolish nuclear power. They fear that proliferation of nuclear weapons is promoted by the existence of nuclear power reactors. Thus some keep fabricating unsubstantiated charges that there are “problems” with nuclear waste disposal e.g. at Yucca Mountain, while their real intention is to disrupt nuclear power development. To be believable, they should isolate and separate their valid concern for nuclear weapons proliferation from the issue of whether the operation of nuclear power plants and disposal of radio-waste can be done safely. The two issues are totally distinct and different. In this book I hope I have clearly shown that the second issue is a non-issue and that we have no choice but to expand nuclear electricity production if we want to avoid a no-oil calamity after 2030. Regarding the first issue, some thoughts on promoting non-proliferation are presented below. They require a review of non-scientific unpredictable human mass behavior.
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Notes
- 1.
Recent announcements that Denmark obtains 20% of its electricity from wind-mills, only applies to that country’s electric grid. If energy from natural gas and petrol used by its transportation fleets are added, the wind-energy percentage of total energy usage is less than 10%.
- 2.
In spite of more than 60 years of uranium enrichment research, the most suitable form for uranium isotope separation remains gaseous uranium hexafluoride (UF6). Enrichment of uranium metal vapor by the calutron and AVLIS processes are the only non-hexafluoride methods that produced experimental batches of enriched U-235. While technically feasible, both have been abandoned for being too costly for large-scale industrial uranium enrichment.
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Eerkens, J.W. (2010). Nuclear Weapon Controls and Non-proliferation. In: The Nuclear Imperative. Topics in Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8667-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8667-9_8
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