Uranium and Nuclear Energy

The peaceful use of nuclear energy began in the 1950s with the assumption that it would make electricity abundantly available at low cost. However, mistrust of this energy technology has been salient from its beginnings. After the nuclear catastrophe of 1986 in Chernobyl, Ukraine, public acceptance of nuclear energy plummeted in industrial countries even though the Chernobyl reactor was of a very different design from those common in Western models. The following issues are addressed in this chapter: What are the risks of accidents in nuclear power plants from a technical perspective? What are the dimensions of potential damages? What type of risk assessment does the economic model lead to in the case of nuclear power? What insurance premiums are to be expected if nuclear risks are to be internalized? Are the risks of nuclear power plants insurable at all? If a reassessment of nuclear power is taking place today, it is because greenhouse gas emissions and the need for an active climate protection policy combine with concerns regarding energy supply security. Such a reassessment gives rise to an additional set of questions: How long are uranium reserves expected to last? What are the costs of uranium fuels, and what are their major components? Is the industrial structure of the uranium market competitive or rather monopolistic? Finally, there are issues such as the secure final disposal of radioactive waste as well the dangers of proliferation of nuclear fuels for military purposes. These aspects are touched on briefly in this chapter, while the comparative efficiency of nuclear power plants in electricity generation will be discussed in Sect. 12.2.