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 World must cut down amount of energy gained from fossil fuels, mainly because of global warming problem caused by harmful CO2 emissions, and many people see nuclear energy as the ideal fuel capable to replace dominant fossil fuels. Scientists calculated how nuclear energy production should increase by more than 10 percent each year in period from 2010-2050 in order to satisfy all future energy demands and successfully replace fossil fuels. But is this possible and is this acceptable or not? According to a report published in Inderscience's International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology this rather high growth rate demands greater improvement in nuclear power efficiency, otherwise each new power plant will simply cannibalize the energy produced by earlier nuclear power plants. There are many additional problems that still don't justify dominance that nuclear energy currently has against renewable energy projects and seems like the real solution.
Costs of building such high-power nuclear projects would be too big since it would require tremendous energy input just to build so many new nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants are also producing lots of heat as byproduct and though today this is relatively small effect, with future nuclear projects of greater magnitude this would additionally warm up already warm Earth and cause even bigger impact to already serious global warming problem.Many nuclear energy proponents think that nuclear energy is emission free but as Physicist Joshua Pearce of Clarion University of Pennsylvania explained "each stage of the nuclear-fuel cycle including power plant construction, mining/milling uranium ores, fuel conversion, enrichment (or de-enrichment of nuclear weapons), fabrication, operation, decommissioning, and for short- and long-term waste disposal contribute to greenhouse gas emissions".
However he doesn't suggest abandoning nuclear power option and he considers much more efforts should be mainly done to improve nuclear power efficiency and this could be achieved by orienting to dominant use of only the highest-concentration ores, and switch to fuel enrichment based on gas centrifuge technology, which is much more energy-efficient than current gaseous diffusion methods.
However there are also encouraging results accomplished by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory as they managed to reach a burnup level of fuel in nuclear reactor of astonishing 9 percent, without any fuel failure which is already described as nuclear power achievement milestone, and could significantly improve nuclear power efficiency. Raising a burnup level of fuel in nuclear reactor is important from many different reasons: first and most important it reduces the amount of fuel needed to produce certain amount of energy, it also reduces the volume of used fuel that gets generated, which significantly improves efficiency of total nuclear reactor system. However this 9 percent achievement isn't looking to be final goal for this year as this team plans to achieve a 12-14 percent burnup later this year. A burnup is measure of the neutron irradiation of the fuel and higher burnup allows more of the fissile 235U and of the plutonium bred from the 238U to be utilized, reducing the uranium requirements of the fuel cycle and increasing its efficiency.
This basically means that nuclear energy with current efficiency levels isn't enough to substitute dominant fossil fuels in the next 40 years and that there needs to be much more research efforts, mainly to improve efficiency in order to make nuclear energy solution capable to replace fossil fuels. However with such optimistic results of projects like the one researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory carried out, efficiency can be improved significantly, of course with enough given time and sufficient funding, and nuclear energy could turn out to be possible and efficient alternative to fossil fuels.
More about nuclear energy you can read here.
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