Senator Mark Udall and other lawmakers this week introduced a bill that would authorize research and development of small-scale, modular nuclear power plants to help meet energy needs. Unlike coal and gas power plants, nuclear plants don’t emit greenhouse gases.
The Colorado School of Mines could be well-positioned to receive new federal research funds, Udall said.
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Still with out a national plan accepted for long-term storage the nuclear power industry is slipping back into vogue on little modular sized feet. A sleeping uranium industry in Colorado may be awakened by a Senator’s “silver buckshot” approach to energy resourcing. Claiming that we need nuclear power included for the widest possible range of energy solutions to meet our needs Senator Mark Udall says of his bill “In other words there is no silver bullet that can solve all of our energy challenges; we are going to need silver buckshot.”
This silver buckshot may be aimed more to wooing votes as he also says political reality dictates that energy legislation capping carbon emissions “will not pass” unless it also includes strong provisions for nuclear power .
“The first wave of nuclear power plants will go a long way towards telling us whether new plants can be built on budget and on schedule in the United States,” Udall said.
He suggests “working out the costs ” of electricity from small scale modular nuclear plants while studying how to store the waste long term is a practical approach.
He does acknowledge though that the National Academy of Sciences puts the cost of electricity from new nuclear plants at between 8 to 13 cents per kilowatt-hour, a big range given the average national price of electricity from all types of energy was 10.42 cents in July of 2009, according to the DOE Energy Information Administration.
Currently there is 60,000 metric tons of spent fuel awaiting permanent disposal, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry association, and the nation’s power plants produce 2,000 tons more each year . According to csmonitor.com even if work on Yucca Mountain had continued, it wouldn’t have solved the problem: By the early 2020s, when it would have been completed, the nation’s nuclear waste would have already exceeded the repository’s 70,000-ton capacity.
“If you don’t have a credible endpoint for spent fuel that deals with the long-term safety and security issues, you really have to wonder if nuclear power is a reasonable choice,” says physicist Edwin Lyman, a senior staff scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in Washington.
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