Learning on ScreenATOMS & ENERGY
Series
- Series Name
- Mining Review 21st Year
Issue
Story
- Story No. within this Issue
- 3 / 3
- Summary
- BFI synopsis: examines the place of nuclear energy in the nation’s energy structure.
NCB Commentary - Let’s take a look into the future - into the 1970s. What will we see?
Well, one thing we don’t think we’ll see is a Britain covered with nuclear power stations all producing electicity cheaper than coal fired stations, as the generating people say they will.
Why not? Well, 10 years ago when these stations were being built they said they’d make electricity cheaper than coal. But it didn’t work out that way. Someone’s calculations about efficiency were a bit optimistic. And somebody else forgot that coalmining was all the time getting more efficient, and producing more coal cheaper.
Five or six years ago they seemed to have learned that lesson. Then in charge of the Atomic Energy Authority was Sir Roger Makins.
So let’s suppose that no one today doubts coal’s increasing efficiency.
But what about the increasing cost of the nuclear fuel, Uranium?
Existing nuclear power stations use natural Uranium. It’s scarce and it’s expensive.
Five years from now, the United States alone expects to have six times as many nuclear stations as it has today.
In fifty years time, the United States expects to be using ten times as much electricity as today - 85% of it generated by nuclear power.
They’ve been working on other ideas, of course, notably what are called breeder reactors.
These use a very little Uranium 235 together with plutonium, and, what’s more they breed fuel for themselves by turning cheap Uranium 238 into more plutonium.
So that still doesn’t cover British with nuclear power stations in the ‘70s.
All these stations release heat and energy by nuclear fission, like controlled atom bombs. And like atom bombs, they’re messy. Nobody knows what to do with the radioactive waste material they produce, except bury it at great cost underground of dump it in the sea.
And when, after 20 years or so, each power station is finished they won’t be able to pull them down. They’ll stay radioactive for 600 years, lethal eyesores all over the land.
That’s what they have been working on at Culham, near Oxford. Fusion power would be safer, would make no radio active waste, and has all the fuel it wants waiting for it in the sea, as deuterium, or heavy hydrogen.
But in what sort of a container could you hold a process as hot as the sun?
We do know already. Like an aircraft model suspended in a wind tunnel, by creating magnetic fields around it. Rather like this jet of air supporting a table tennis ball, but with magnetism working on all sides at once.
So magnetic fields could contain something very, very hot. There’d still be problems in keeping atomic particles from escaping, of course.
But fusion power will become reality - one day.
But certainly not in the present century - and so we stick to our prophecy.
We still think that coal and natural gas and oil are going to have to hold the fort for quite a few years yet, until breeder reactors eventually fusion power is ready to take over and help to solve - safely - the problem of our increasing need for energy. - Keywords
- Nuclear energy
- Written sources
- British Film Institute Databases Used for synopsis
The National Archives COAL 32 /13 Scripts for Mining Review, 1960-1963
- Credits:
-
- Sponsor
- National Coal Board
- Production Co.
- National Coal Board Film Unit
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