The question: should nuclear energy power our future?

THE SCIENTIST: Barry Brook
Yes. Nuclear power uses atomic fission (splitting heavy atoms like uranium and plutonium) to generate vast amounts of heat energy.
This can be converted to electricity, or used to synthesise liquid fuels to replace oil. As an energy source, it is more than a million times more concentrated than chemical fuels like coal.

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Today, nuclear power provides about 15 per cent of the world's electricity, but some countries get far more.
France, for instance, sources 80 per cent of its electricity from nuclear fission, and South Korea gets 45 per cent.
The US has more than 100 nuclear plants, supplying 20 per cent of its needs.
Nuclear energy produces no carbon dioxide emissions when operating. Indeed, if all the world's nuclear power stations were replaced by brown-coal power, an additional 3.5 billion tonnes of CO2 would enter the atmosphere each year.
Of course, nuclear electricity, like any other activity in the modern world, has some ''carbon footprint'', because we use fossil fuels to generate a large fraction of our electricity and to power our vehicles, industrial equipment, steel smelters, concrete factories and so on. But in a future world powered largely by nuclear energy, its footprint would be reduced to virtually zero.
Nuclear energy also has the great advantages of cheap, abundant fuel and incredibly reliable operation. It is not dependent on the fickleness of natural energy flows (such as wind and solar) and so does not require expensive energy storage.
This energy source is a proven economic way to replace coal. This is why rapidly developing countries such as China are pursuing nuclear energy so vigorously.
Currently, 25 new nuclear power plants are under construction in China, and the target there is for 112 gigawatts online by 2020.
This is the equivalent of four times Australia's average electricity generation, all built in 10 years and without a price on carbon.
A type of nuclear technology nowbeing commercialised in India, Russia and China, called ''fast reactors'', can be used to repeatedly recycle its fuel and consume old nuclear waste. Because of the incredible efficiency of this next-generation technology, we have already mined enough uranium to power the global economy for more than 500 years. This is truly a sustainable energy option.
Nuclear power offers our best chance – indeed, probably the only realistic hope – of curing our addiction to fossil fuels and eliminating carbon emissions, in time, on budget, and at sufficient scale.
ProfessorBarry Brook is director of climate science at the University of Adelaide's Environment Institute and coauthor of Why vsWhy: Nuclear Power (PanteraPress,2010).

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