The Case for Nuclear

From a purely engineering perspective, there is no better source of zero emissions electricity than nuclear power. The reasons are many.

Compatibility. Nuclear power plants can dispatch electricity when requested and they are directly compatible with the 50 cycles a second alternating current (AC) electricity system.

In contrast, solar and wind power generators do not have inertia, do not have system strength, cannot dispatch when requested and do not provide synchronous AC power.

The mining footprint of nuclear is small. There is no need for battery materials such as lithium, manganese, nickel or cobalt. Nor is there need for rare earth elements such as europium, terbium, neodymium and many others.

Nuclear uses modest amounts of copper, steel and concrete.

The resource footprint for uranium mining is small because only 1 tonne of uranium in a nuclear power station is needed to produce the same amount of electrical energy as approximately 100,000 tonnes of coal in a coal-fired power station.

The real estate footprint is small. Approximately three square km of land is needed for a 1 gigawatt (GW) nuclear generator, although there would always be an additional exclusion area surrounding the site.

In contrast, solar farms need about a square kilometre of land area for each 50 megawatts of generation capacity. Thus, a 3GW solar farm producing the same annual generated energy as a 1GW nuclear plant would require about 60 square km.

Windfarms need almost 10 times more area than solar farms per megawatt. 

In principle, nuclear power plants can be located close to existing transmission lines or even at old coal-fired power stations. This would save £58 billion earmarked to be spent on national grid upgrades needed for wind & solar. 

The safety record of nuclear power is excellent.

The deaths from accidents and air pollution per unit of electrical energy generated are comparable with solar and wind power, in the extremely low end of the range at less than 0.05 deaths per terawatt-hour.