Japan’s nuclear power crisis will spur discussion on atomic power in Australia and worldwide but the underlying demand for nuclear energy will not go away, a leading academic has predicted.
Professor Barry Brook, who holds the Sir Hubert Wilkins chair of climate change at the University of Adelaide, has forecast that the incident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant will lead to a better understanding about modern nuclear technology and how the latest generation of nuclear plants could help mitigate climate change by reducing use of fossil fuels.
“Anyone who thinks critically about the future of energy supply will inevitably draw the conclusion that nuclear power will be a significant part of our future energy portfolio," Professor Brook told a uranium conference in Adelaide.
This applies not just to surging economies with huge un-met power demand such as India and China but also to economies such as Australia that heavily rely on fossil fuels to generate power, he said.
Professor Brook differentiated between the “Generation 1" plants designed in the 1960s such as Fukushima Daiichi and the new breed of reactors being built in South Korea, China, Europe and the US that include fully protected cooling power systems that could cool themselves in an emergency independent of external sources.
“The underlying demand for nuclear energy is not going away and countries facing surging power demands will not ultimately be changing their minds about expanding or implementing a nuclear energy cycle," Professor Brook said.
The Australian Financial Review