Why the World Needs Nuclear Power

James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute, explains how future fourth generation nuclear power plants will be cleaner and safer because they will be able to burn highly radioactive spent fuel rods. Harnessing this technology will be pivotal for America’s future, he says.

James Hansen: The kind of nuclear power we have now is called second-generation nuclear power. It’s comparable in cost to coal. Once you have the nuclear power plant, then the fuel is very inexpensive, so nuclear power is quite inexpensive. But it’s difficult in the United States to get a nuclear power plant built, and it takes so many years that it drives the cost up. So now in England they’ve realized that they will need to have nuclear power in the future, so they’ve put a limit — once a government commission decides on where the power plants will be built, the public will have one year to object to this and possibly get some changes. But they can’t drag it out six or seven years, the way it happens in the United States, because that drives up the price tremendously.

And there’s also the possibility for fourth-generation nuclear power. That’s a technology which allows you to burn all of the nuclear fuel. Presently, nuclear power plants burn less than 1 percent of the energy in the nuclear fuel. Fourth-generation nuclear power allows the neutrons to move faster, so it can burn all of the fuel. Furthermore, it can burn nuclear waste, so it can solve the nuclear waste problem. And the United States is still the technology leader in fourth-generation nuclear power. In 1994, Argonne National Laboratory, now called Idaho National Laboratory, was ready to build a fourth-generation nuclear power plant, but the Clinton-Gore administration canceled that research because of the antinuclear sentiments in the Democratic Party. Well, we still have the best expertise in that technology, and we should develop it because it’s something we could also sell to China and India, because they’re going to need nuclear power. They are not going to be able to get all of their energy from the sun and from the wind.