14 facts and figures about nuclear power

As I near an answer to my question 'Is nuclear power a risk worth taking?', I thought I would just break things up a little and list a few of interesting and surprising facts I have learnt along the way. 

.Nuclear power provides roughly 6% of the world's energy and 13% of the world's electricity with 437 operational nuclear reactors in 31 countries globally (IAEA, 2013).

. 1 out of 5 houses and businesses in the US are powered by nuclear energy 

. Currently there is known to be 27 million tons of terrestrial  uranium resources,  if nuclear power was to become our main energy resource this amount would quickly become exhausted (Mackay, 2009). 

. Almost all uranium is in the seawater, where there is the potential for up to 4.5 billion tons to be tapped into. So far its extraction has only been achieved in small laboratory experiments, for nuclear energy to be sustainable for millennia rather than centuries, uranium from the oceans could be crucial.  

The diagram above shows sustainable rates of nuclear power production over the next 1000 years (i.e. using solely once-through reactors and mined uranium, resources would last for 1000 years if we produced nuclear power at a rate of 0.55 kWd per person) 125 kWh/d per person is current consumption in Britain Source: Mackay, 2009

. Compared to other carbon free and carbon-neutral options nuclear power requires far less land per watt. A 1000 MW nuclear plant takes up between 1-4 sq km, the equivalent solar park would require 20-50 sq km and wind farm 50-150 sq km (our-energy.com, 2007).

. The mass of fossil fuel consumed by the average British person is 16kg per day, in contrast the amount of uranium 

needed to provide the same amount of energy is 2 grams (Mackay, 2009). 

. Nuclear fusion could become a viable energy option in the future.  The energy released by fusion is three to four times greater than the energy released by fission, however extremely high energy is required to create the correct conditions. A breakthrough was made in October of last year when a US lab became the first to release more energy from the fusion reaction than the energy they used in heating the fuel (BBC, 2013). 

. If nuclear waste is recycled, its lifetime is reduced to 300 years.  This is becoming  possible with the introduction of new fast reactors, which have already had 400 reactor years of service (WNA, 2013). 

.Nuclear power in fact has one of the lowest death rates relative to other electricity generating technologies as the graph shows below. However it should be mentioned that the death toll for events like Chernobyl vary greatly from fewer than 50 to 1 million in a study by Yablakov et al (2009).  The effect of chronic low level radiation exposure is subject to much debate.

Estimates of death rates of electricity generation technologies: Source: Mackay, 2009

. There has not been, in the history of worldwide commercial nuclear power, a known case of stolen commercially used nuclear fuel .

. The average nuclear power plant in the US is 33 years old(Forbes, 2012)

. Estimates by the EIA suggest that new wind generation Is set to be cheaper than new nuclear generation with costs rising following Fukushima (EIA, 2013)

Thanks for reading!