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Nuclear Power and Sustainability

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The Palgrave Handbook of Global Sustainability

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Abstract

A comprehensive coverage starts with a clear view on the three sources of energy for generating electricity. Two of them, fossil and atomic fuels, are converted in hot gases or steam, needing cumbersome and wasteful processes. By skipping this mess, harvested renewable currents (wind, light, and water) conquer a central position in the transition to a low-carbon future. Knowing highlights of eighty-year nuclear history is prerequisite for apprehending today’s position of nuclear power, shielded by peculiar nuclear advocacy. The sustainability degree of nuclear power is assessed on criteria helpful for measuring performance in politics, planet, prosperity, people, and risk as fundamental dimensions. Except for low-carbon, nuclear power fails on all criteria. Nuclear proponents gloss over the essential criteria by magnifying low-carbon. The advocacy is simultaneously secret and vocal. In aggregated power systems, harvesting renewable currents and nuclear power deliver incompatible power supplies. NP ruins the business model of wind and PV, and vice versa, depending on assigned priority in consecutive real-time load stackings.

NP is financially very expensive, without accounting costs of decommissioning, waste management, associated risks of nuclear accidents, and weaponry proliferation. Similar conditions apply on announced small modular reactors, revival of failed breeders, high-temperature reactors, etc. (GEN4), and fusion (GEN5). On top of NP’s societal hazards and risks, climate change itself implies additional risks for NP. The protracting quest for the NP utopia is deleterious for sustainability.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

    Aviel Verbruggen

  2. Technical University Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Ben Wealer

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  1. Aviel Verbruggen
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  2. Ben Wealer
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Correspondence to Aviel Verbruggen .

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Verbruggen, A., Wealer, B. (2021). Nuclear Power and Sustainability. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Global Sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38948-2_15-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38948-2_15-1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-38948-2

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