If there was ever a clear winner from this Climate Change debate, it has to be Nuclear Power. What a volte face for Nuclear energy in this world! A technology that was lying in the dumps, long forgotten about, mired in the security/weapons debate and any exciting news about Nuclear technologies only came from the rogue states like Iran and North Korea and the not-so-rogue, our lovely neighbor, Pakistan!
The whole debate has been turned on its head in the last year or so. It all began with the India getting the NSG clearance for building Nuclear plants using foreign technology and foreign fuel. The huge market potential in India sent foreign companies scurrying with lucrative deals. China has also stepped up the gas on Nuclear in recent years. And suddenly you see a frenzy around this much-maligned technology. President Obama never shies of talking about Nuclear in all his Climate Change speeches, Dept of Energy is undertaking a major financing freebie for Nuclear energy and the developed world also seems to be very excited again. So much so, that we have started to hear the long forgotten epithet "Nuclear Power-It will make power so cheap that it will be costly to meter!"
At this point, it would be suitable to look at the emergence on this technology in the power sector. Since the World War II and the nuclear bombing of Japan, using the N-word was a taboo! However, basic research was still on in different countries on this technology. The Oil Embargo in 1973 was the point in time when this technology came into prominence. Fearing a major challenge to their energy security, the major industrial nations in the world went about deploying Nuclear Energy for power generation with a purpose. US and France, the leaders in this area, were especially concerned about their source of energy. US was growing at a frenetic rate then, and was increasingly becoming a energy guzzler economy. The oil shock shook them out of their dependence on arguably the most volatile region in the world for their energy needs. France, on the other hand, has an interest in diversifying into an energy source for which they had the raw materials. There are no natural resources in France, when it comes to oil, coal or gas. They had uranium mines and all that pointed only in one direction: Go Nuclear! US built so much nuclear power so that 20% of their entire electricity needs came from Nuclear and France built about 55 reactors in a relatively short span of 15 years. The honeymoon period for nuclear ended with the horrifying accidents at the Three Mile Island (TMI) plant in the US and Chernobyl in Russia, then USSR. All the major countries balked at building more nuclear plants and public perception was at its lowest ebb. France, however, in a momentum that is difficult to fathom, kept at its plan unabated! I cannot still reason how were they able to do so at a time when all newly proposed plants around the world were canceled.
The things going in favor of Nuclear were its very low cost of operation and near zero emissions. The very very high cost of building the plant has always been a spoilsport, and continues to be so! However, with the climate change debate taking center stage and emission reduction being the staple diet of global negotiations, Nuclear energy has risen from the ashes like a Phoenix.
However, all is not rosy with nuclear energy. The MIT report on Future of Nuclear Power raises the issues of cost, safety, waste and proliferation as the major impediments in large scale deployment of Nuclear. I would add the issue of public perception to this list. Governments around the world will have to play this space really carefully for the images of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl and TMI never seem to fade in public memory. For Nuclear power to be back in center stage, public's fears will need be allayed.
As far as I am concerned, I am really excited about what Bill Gates talked in a TED lecture, TerraPower, which promises to use what is today's nuclear waste to produce power. That could be a game changer in this space, for it takes care of a few important hurdles for nuclear. Whatever be the case, I would urge you to read up a few keywords on nuclear power for it does feel cool to drop in a discussion on them at a networking table these days! I can guarantee you a few minutes of undivided attention of your audience:)
