The Oil Drum

[editor's note, by Prof. Goose] This is an updated/edited repost by Martin Sevior, Associate Professor, School of Physics, University of Melbourne. We thought this a worthy topic for discussion as nuclear power keeps coming up in many of our threads. The original post can be found here. (Forget not the reddit and digg buttons...)

In the middle of the last year it became clear to me that the Australian Government was interested in having a debate about Nuclear Energy for Australia. I decided that we, in the School of Physics, could make a positive contribution to the debate and organized a study group to investigate this. We constructed a wiki-based website (http://nuclearinfo.net) where we placed our findings. We went live in December, 2005 and have updated the website as we've learned more about energy issues and Nuclear Power.

In this post I draw heavily on that website and restrict myself to talking about light water fission reactors. There are a variety of different and more advanced reactor schemes that could be addressed in a future post. There are more details on our website on all of the topics covered here.

[editor's note, by Prof. Goose] This is a guest post by Martin Sevior, Associate Professor, School of Physics, University of Melbourne. (also, forget not the reddit and digg buttons...)

In the middle of the last year it became clear to me that the Australian Government was interested in having a debate about Nuclear Energy for Australia. I decided that we, in the School of Physics, could make a positive contribution to the debate and organized a study group to investigate this. We constructed a wiki-based website (http://nuclearinfo.net) where we placed our findings. We went live last December but have updated the website as we've learned more about energy issues and Nuclear Power.

In this post I draw heavily on website and restrict myself to talking about light water fission reactors. There are a variety of different and more advanced reactor schemes that could be addressed in a future post. There are more details on our website on all of the topics covered here.