Authors:
- Reviews future options and strategies for low-carbon energy systems
- Makes a detailed risk and benefit analysis to compare the real economic, environmental and societal costs of nuclear, renewable and fossil energies
- Formulates the demanding criteria for taming nuclear risks by excluding mechanisms that lead to serious accidents by design
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
About this book
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.
Authors and Affiliations
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Professor of Entrepreneurial Risks, Department of Management, Technology and Economics, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
Didier Sornette
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Professor Emeritus for Safety Technology and Analysis, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
Wolfgang Kröger
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Department of Management, Technology and Economics, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
Spencer Wheatley
About the authors
He has been a visiting professor in Australia, France, the US and China, before taking on the chair of Entrepreneurial Risks at ETH-Zurich in 2006, where he is also Professor of Physics and of Geophysics. He is the Director of the Financial Crisis Observatory (since 2008) and Founding member of the Risk Center at ETH Zurich (2011).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: New Ways and Needs for Exploiting Nuclear Energy
Authors: Didier Sornette, Wolfgang Kröger, Spencer Wheatley
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97652-5
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Energy, Energy (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-97651-8Published: 10 October 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-07384-8Published: 25 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-97652-5Published: 29 September 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 276
Number of Illustrations: 13 b/w illustrations, 77 illustrations in colour
Topics: Nuclear Energy, Quality Control, Reliability, Safety and Risk, Energy Policy, Economics and Management, Climate Change, Energy Security, Nuclear Energy