The history of mankind is a story of ascent to unprecedented levels of
comfort, productivity and consumption, enabled by the increased mastery
of the basic reserves and flows of energy. This miraculous trajectory is
confronted by the consensus that anthropogenic emissions are harmful and
must decrease, requiring de-carbonization of the energy system.
The mature field of indicator-based sustainability assessment provides a
rigorous systematic framework to balance the pros and cons of the
various existing energy technologies using lifecycle assessments and
weighting criteria covering the environment, economy, and society, as
the three pillars of sustainability. In such a framework, nuclear power
is ranked favorably, but since emphasis is often placed on radioactive
wastes and risk aversion, renewables are usually ranked top. However,
quantifying the severity of the consequences of nuclear accidents on a
rough integral cost basis and balancing severity with low core-damage
accident probabilities indicates that the average external cost of such
accidents is similar to that of modern renewables, and far less than
carbon-based energy.
This book formulates the overall goal and associated unprecedented
demanding criteria of taming nuclear risks by excluding mechanisms that
lead to serious accidents and avoiding extremely long stewardship times
as far as possible, by design. It reviews the key design features of
nuclear power generation, paving the way for the exploration of
radically new combinations of technologies to come up with
"revolutionary" or even "exotic" system designs. The book also provides
scores for the selected designs and discusses the high potential for
far-reaching improvements, with small modular lines of the best versions
as being most attractive.
Given the ambition and challenges, the authors call for an urgent
increase in funding of at least two orders of magnitude for a broad
international civilian "super-Apollo" program on nuclear energy systems.
Experience indicates that such investments in fundamental technologies
enable otherwise unattainable revolutionary innovations with massive
beneficial spillovers to the private sector and the public for the next
generations.
