ABSTRACT
Apart from contributing a negligible amount of greenhouse gases (neglecting the contribution associated with the construction of a nuclear plant), nuclear does share a number of other properties with renewable forms of energy, which arguably allows us to consider nuclear to be a form of renewable energy. Whether or not you believe this controversial assertion or the claim that new generations of nuclear reactors are expected to lack many of the problems with earlier ones, the inclusion of nuclear power in a book on renewable energy can be easily justified, because in making the case for renewable energy we need to consider the relative merits of all energy sources. Moreover, nuclear has a property that it shares with no other energy source-namely, an extraordinary high energy density. Specifically, the energy liberated in nuclear reactions is roughly a million times greater per unit mass of fuel than that liberated in any chemical process. It is this extraordinary energy density that makes nuclear potentially simultaneously attractive as an energy source and dangerous if not carefully controlled. In this chapter, the primary focus will be on nuclear fission-the splitting of the atomic nucleus-but some attention will be given to the other prospective way of extracting nuclear energy, namely, nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion, the combining of light nuclei, has been an active field of research for many years, but at the time of this writing, no
commercial fusion reactors exist-nor are they likely to exist for at least several decades according to most estimates.
