Nuclear energy is definitely powerful. Uranium, the most common nuclear fuel, produces over a million times more energy per kilogram than gasoline. That being said, nuclear energy is not feasible to power a nation until it can be made renewable. Uranium is a finite resource, and it would be dangerous to build an energy production system around a nonrenewable resource. Countries are developing methods to reuse nuclear fuel, which would bring it closer to a reliable and renewable energy source. In order to see where nuclear energy in America should end up, we must look to France.
Upwards of 76% of the electricity produced in France comes from nuclear power plants. Their dependency on nuclear energy is not what makes them a good example, but how they have developed a nuclear reprocessing system. Nuclear reprocessing is the process of extracting viable nuclear materials from spent fuel. Uranium is one of the most common nuclear fuel sources, but there is an alternative in plutonium. Nuclear reactors run on nuclear fission, a method of energy production where radioactive elements are bombarded with neutrons until they burst. When a massive element like uranium explodes, it is reduced to smaller elements. One of the possible byproducts of a nuclear reaction is the element plutonium. Plutonium is, in and of itself, a viable nuclear fuel source. Countries like France have worked to develop a recycling system whereby they can harvest plutonium from spent fuel, and using that plutonium as the fuel for another nuclear fission reaction. Experts currently predict that the world’s uranium will be completely gone in two hundred years. If, by recycling, nuclear fuel can be used twice, it stands to reason that implementing this system in all the world’s nuclear reactors will make uranium last four hundred years. As technology improves, it may be possible to recycle nuclear fuel even more and then, at last, it will be a renewable energy source.