Toward a new golden age for nuclear energy ?

I was relating earlier that renewable energies are witnessing a boom worldwide. It seems that nuclear energy might also face the same phenomenon with climate change mitigation.

Nuclear has a seriously bad reputation for some ecologists, and this even if it is the second lowest greenhouse gases emitting energy solution.

But with the crises of energy scarcity and the imperative of fast climate change mitigation, this solution becomes more and more interesting.

I consider the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s in Europe a golden age for nuclear energy as most nuclear plants were built during this period. The catastrophe of Chernobyl in 1986 put an end to this expansion.

To exemplify the fact that nuclear is coming back with a revenge, I will mention below two different blogs and three different articles.

First, in TalkClimateChange, a blog done by three teams of bloggers, the green one wrote an article that got me thinking, called Please Stop Complaining About Nuclear Power. Here is a short excerpt :

We might suggest that an aggressive focus on energy efficiency as an integrated part of future energy production plans might go some way towards easing the current pain. It would make expensive energy bills easier to swallow, renewable energy resources more viable, and nuclear plants easier to sell to the public.

I couldn’t agree more as I have been strongly advocating energy efficiency in my previous articles and as I share the views expressed in this article.

If the representatives of the ecologist movement, generally so much against the energy of the atoms, are beginning to change their minds, nuclear might enter a new golden age.

Many countries have recently been thinking on installing nuclear plants on their soil to answer their energy demand. Indeed, in 2007 I noted several projects in the United States, in Russia, in the United Kingdom (with some developments last month).

You can access my various articles on nuclear my accessing my articles on this topic via the nuclear tag.

But as the Business of Green Blog from the International Herald Tribune notes in Welcome to the new nuclear era, the situation hasn’t changed that drastically. Indeed, there are still countries like Germany or Italy that are strongly against this energy efficiency.

This blog also proposed another article called The nuclear option for Europe? recently claiming that nuclear supplies “the largest amount of low-carbon energy in Western Europe”.

As read in this article :

Nuclear energy technology, its proponents say, already works and can supply a huge base load of power to keep national grids supplied. By contrast, renewable sources of power like wind and solar are intermittent and less able — at least for the moment — to deliver the quantity of electricity needed to drive modern, industrial nations.

To conclude on this matter, it is worth noting that Areva, one of the leading manufacturer of nuclear reactors, recently released its 2007 figures and the results are staggering : its backlog increased by 55 percent in 2007 compared to 2006, reaching nearly 40 billion Euros.

You can read out more on Areva’s sales figures there.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Be sure that I will keep you posted on this issue and many others as news arise, so, stay tuned and don’t hesitate to leave your opinion on this topic and write a comment as I will gladly read you.