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Energy: Could Public Sentiment Allow Nuclear to Make a Comeback?
After disasters like Three Mile Island in the US, the Chernobyl disaster in Russia, and Fukushima Daiichi in Japan, public sentiment on nuclear power soured. But over the last five years, Americans have slowly become more optimistic about it. A survey in 2020 found that 56 percent of Americans support our current use of nuclear energy in the US and are open to more advanced nuclear options.
While nuclear is the best option for not producing any carbon emissions, and despite improved public sentiment, nuclear’s past track record will likely make it a difficult sell to a wary public.
One modern nuclear option that is being widely researched and positively received by many scientists is the use of nuclear microreactors. Microreactors are significant smaller than the traditional nuclear reactors — as much as 1000 times smaller — and they are portable. The reactors are so small that they could be transported in small trailers. The reactors use low-enriched uranium fuel, which means that they would be very difficult if not impossible to weaponize and they are significantly safer to use.
Jonathan Cobb, senior analyst at the World Nuclear Association, said that “today’s large reactors fit the bill to meet city-scale demand for clean electricity. But smaller reactors will be able to supply low-carbon electricity and heat to remote regions and other situations where gigawatt-scale capacities would be too much.”
Darrell Proctor in an article for Power magazine, wrote that “the use of microreactors to expand distributed power generation is part of a trend toward providing electricity to remote areas, as well as to military bases and commercial operations that need access to power but are far from the traditional grid.”
Jacopo Buongiorno, MIT’s TEPCO Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, said that microreactors enable a “sort of energy on demand. If the customer wants either heat or electricity, they can get it within a couple of months, or even weeks, and then it’s plug and play. This machine arrives on the site, and just a few days later, you start getting your energy. So, it’s a product, it’s not a project.”
