A Closer Look At Nuclear Power
20/09/10 15:43
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to tour the Farley Nuclear Plant in Dothan courtesy of Alabama Power. I was extremely impressed by what I saw. Nuclear technology has come a long way since Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. There are now safeguards upon safeguards to prevent those kinds of disasters from happening. For every action there is a failsafe in case of malfunction. In most cases, there are failsafes for the failsafes. That's not to say it would be impossible for there to be a problem, but it is a lot less likely with the new procedures and technology.
Having done a lot of research on the state's energy profile during the cap and trade debate, I wasn't suprised to learn that we get over a quarter of our electricity in Alabama from nuclear power. (Incidentally, we're also one of the top hydroelectric-generating states east of the Rocky Mountains.)
This is a good thing because nuclear energy is clean energy. Nuclear power plants produce electricity by boiling water into steam. The steam turns the turbines to produce electricity. This process is the same for coal and natural gas based plants, they simply use a different method of heating the water. At a nuclear plant the water is heated through a process called fission, which is the splitting of atoms of uranium in a nuclear reactor. At Farley, the nuclear reactor is buried far underground.
This cycle produces no greenhouse gases, and limited amounts of waste. Uranium fuel is cycled back through the reactor until it no longer has the properties to aid the process. Used uranium fuel, called "spent" fuel, is kept in a pool on site. When the pool is full, the waste is then transferred to steel cannisters and contained on site in concrete and steel cylindrical buildings (they sit on a pad to prevent any seepage into the ground). At Farley, 30+ years of producing nuclear energy had generated a very small amount of waste. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to count the number of storage buildings on the pad and I'm not a good judge of space, but it looked to me to be a pad about 3/4 the size of a football field.
I was pretty much sold on nuclear before I did the tour, but after having been through a plant and learning the ins and outs of how it works and seeing the safety measures, I was even more certain that nuclear energy technology is going to be necessary to meet America's growing energy needs.
Having done a lot of research on the state's energy profile during the cap and trade debate, I wasn't suprised to learn that we get over a quarter of our electricity in Alabama from nuclear power. (Incidentally, we're also one of the top hydroelectric-generating states east of the Rocky Mountains.)
This is a good thing because nuclear energy is clean energy. Nuclear power plants produce electricity by boiling water into steam. The steam turns the turbines to produce electricity. This process is the same for coal and natural gas based plants, they simply use a different method of heating the water. At a nuclear plant the water is heated through a process called fission, which is the splitting of atoms of uranium in a nuclear reactor. At Farley, the nuclear reactor is buried far underground.
This cycle produces no greenhouse gases, and limited amounts of waste. Uranium fuel is cycled back through the reactor until it no longer has the properties to aid the process. Used uranium fuel, called "spent" fuel, is kept in a pool on site. When the pool is full, the waste is then transferred to steel cannisters and contained on site in concrete and steel cylindrical buildings (they sit on a pad to prevent any seepage into the ground). At Farley, 30+ years of producing nuclear energy had generated a very small amount of waste. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to count the number of storage buildings on the pad and I'm not a good judge of space, but it looked to me to be a pad about 3/4 the size of a football field.
I was pretty much sold on nuclear before I did the tour, but after having been through a plant and learning the ins and outs of how it works and seeing the safety measures, I was even more certain that nuclear energy technology is going to be necessary to meet America's growing energy needs.
0 Comments