Academic Review 2024

55 ACADEMIC REVIEW 2024

does decide to become more dependent on fission power, this will be something to address in order to prevent market failure. The other problem involves the possibility of nuclear meltdowns – this is an extreme case for market failure. Although advancements in fission technology have improved safety, the risk of an accident can never be zero. Fortunately, there has never been a nuclear meltdown in the UK. There have been, however, major cases elsewhere, such as Chernobyl. The external costs caused by this meltdown were immense. An area of 150,000 square kilometres has been affected, the estimated cost of this accident is over $235 billion. The building and operating of this particular power plant has negatively impacted economic growth. If the UK plans to grow the use of fission energy, it will need risk assessments and evaluations for new reactors, to prevent further market failures. There are currently two main methods of achieving fusion. Magnetic confinement fusion and inertial confinement fusion. The first involves using magnets to confine heated plasma inside a vacuum chamber. The most popular reactor using this method is the Tokamak. The Tokamak works by injecting a small amount of gas (D-T fuel) into the toroidal-shaped chamber and heats it into plasma using magnetic superconductors (Kikuchi, Lackner, & Quang Tran, 2012). The high electrical current energizes the electrons and nuclei causing them to move faster and collide. The heating system is aided by injection of high energy neutral particles or high intensity radiofrequency waves, which can raise the temperature to about fifteen million degrees Celsius. This heat together with the focusing and pressurising coming from the magnetic fields allows suitable conditions for fusion. The reactor then transfers the energy produced by absorbing the neutrons (product of D-T fusion) with high kinetic energy and transfers them through as heat. The heat is captured by circulating a coolant through the walls to be sent to steam generators.

This can be seen in fission plants when spillages of radioactive waste occur. Fortunately, there have not been any major spillages in the UK, only minor ones from Torness and Hartlepool plants in 2012 (Edwards, 2011). In those cases, the workers were evacuated, and the radioactive spillage was kept within the facility causing no external costs. The surrounding environment can also be exposed to radioactive material when power plants dispose of their waste. ‘Globally, about 15 million packages of radioactive material are transported each year on public roads, railways and ships’ (WNA, 2022). This is a risk to the environment and people. There has, however, never been an incident, showing that it is possible to run fission power plants without any external costs. When it comes to future planning however, some people are concerned about the potential effects of the build-up of radioactive waste especially as companies seem to be taking a “we’ll worry about it later” approach. If the UK Nuclear fusion Unlike nuclear fission, fusion works by combining small elements to make bigger ones, releasing energy as it does so. The most common reaction you see is the fusion of deuterium and tritium (D-T fusion) to form a helium nucleus and a neutron. This is because they are the most efficient in releasing energy at lower temperatures. Deuterium is abundant and can be extracted from seawater, however tritium is not naturally occurring. If fusion gets commercialised, finding a stable and sufficient source of tritium will be a challenge. Solutions have already been proposed, such as extracting tritium from the byproducts of fission reactors, or by breeding it from lithium. Fusion is the most efficient producer of energy that we know of in the universe. It is around four times more efficient than fission, which means a small pellet of (solid) D-T fuel produces the equivalent energy of four tons of coal. However, artificial fusion is hard to engineer.