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Nuclear switch-off
• MARIANNE Tudor is right to be concerned about nuclear power stations (Will cuts cost lives? October 31).
Generating electricity by nuclear power is like taking a sledgehammer to crack a tiny, fragile nut. For a nuclear pile runs at temperatures several times hotter than the surface of the sun. It needs to be cooled down, and the typical nuclear power station, which produces 1.5 gigawatts (1.5x109w) requires a trillion (1012) litres of sea water plus 100 billion (1011) litres of mains water – per annum – to cool it down.
This water is heated up by well over 2,000oc on average before being discharged into the sea, where it devastates much of the local marine life. But it is far more sinister than this.
By taking the specific heat capacity of water as 4,200J kg-1 K-1, it can be shown that the power required to heat this much water per annum by 2,000oc is a massive 292.8 gigawatts.
This means that for every gigawatt of power produced, about 195 gigawatts of power goes into directly heating up the environment.
For each 25w of electricity produced by nuclear power, therefore, the equivalent of nearly four kilowatts – a four-bar heater – is on, back at the power station.
Worldwide, nuclear power stations generate heat equivalent to 37 billion four-bar heaters being on 24 hours a day.
So, apart from being extremely dangerous and astronomically costly, nuclear power stations are a major contributor to human-induced climate change and by far eclipse the efforts of greenhouse gases.
Human induced or not, climate change is upon us, the ice poles and permafrost are melting, and sea levels will inevitably rise.
So, instead of building even more nuclear power stations, we should be turning off all the ones we have so stupidly built already, and we should make each of them flood- and tsunami-proof – otherwise the coming flood will be radioactive and the islands will become uninhabitable by warm-blooded life for thousands of millions of years.
Dr HARRY G MOSS
Manor Road, N16
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