Guest post by Michael Dickey (cross posted from his website matus1976.com)
The decline of nuclear power has had a significant effect on global carbon emissions and subsequently any anthropogenic global warming effect. To see the extent of this influence, let us first take a look at total U.S. carbon emissions since 1900.
According to the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, from 1900 to 2006, US carbon emissions rose from 181 MMT (million metric tons) to 1,569 MMT.
Taking a look at US electricity generation by type, according to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. generates 51% of its power from coal, and cumulatively about 71% of its power from fossil fuel sources.
Comparing the energy source to Carbon emissions, the burning of coal to generate electricity alone emits more CO2 than any other single source, about one-third of the total.
As the US Electrical Generation by Type figure shows, about 20% of the U.S. electrical supply comes from nuclear power. Let us now imagine that the U.S. never built any nuclear power plants, but instead built more coal plants to generate the electricity those nuclear plants would have generated.
According to the Energy Information Administration, since 1971, 18.6 billion MW•h (Megawatt hour) of electrical power have been generated by nuclear sources (1). According to the US Department of Energy, every kW•h (kilowatt hour) of electricity generated by coal produces 2.095 lbs of CO2 (2).
As the calculations in the table above show, every MW•h of electricity generated by coal generates 2,095 pounds of carbon dioxide. For 18.6 billion MW•h at 2,095 pounds of CO2 per MW•h, this amounts to 39.0 trillion additional lbs of CO2, or 17.7 billion metric tons. Finally, converting the 17.7 billion metric tons of CO2 to carbon results in 4.842 billion, or 4,842 million metric tons of carbon.
What all this shows is that had this power been generated by coal plants, an additional 4,842 million metric tons of carbon would have been released into the atmosphere. Breaking this calculation down by year, what would this have made our carbon emissions record look like?
Again in blue we see the real world US carbon emissions, but in green we see what the carbon emissions would have been if all the electricity generated by our nuclear infrastructure had instead been generated by coal power plants.
In all, carbon emissions would have been 14.6% higher, with 1,782 MMT of carbon released without nuclear power plants, while only 1,552 MMT are released with our current nuclear infrastructure. This is why many leading environmentalists, such as James Lovelock (author of the Gaia Hypothesis) are vocal supporters of nuclear power.
But this chart is not entirely fair to nuclear power, because the growth of nuclear power was severely derailed by environmentalist hyperbole and outright scaremongering. Because of the attacks by environmentalists on nuclear power, many planned power plants were cancelled, and many existing plants licenses were not renewed. The result, according to Al Gore himself in “Our Choice” was:
“Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were canceled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage…Thus, only about one-fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating.” (3)
Let us take a look then at U.S. carbon emissions if the U.S. had simply built and operated the power plants that were originally planned.
Yup, that’s right people: if the US had simply built and operated the nuclear power plants it had planned and licensed, it would today be producing not only less carbon emissions than it did in 1972, but would in fact be emitting almost half the carbon emissions it is now.
But let’s not forget that the very planning and licensing of nuclear power plants was drastically affected by the anti-scientific opposition. Looking again at the Energy Information Administrations figures, the average sustained growth for nuclear generating capacity was increasing by about 28.8 million Megawatt hours for a 20 year period from 1971 to 1989
Here we see a chart taken from the EIA data which shows the growth of real nuclear generating capacity in blue, and the projected growth in red, had the growth of the previous 20 year period been sustained (remember, this is still only about one-fourth of the intended capacity). In this graph, any year which produced less than the average of the previous 20 years was increased to that average of 28.8 million MW•h.
Now let’s take this projected growth and imagine the U.S. had actually built a nuclear infrastructure at this level. What would our carbon emissions look like?
Incredibly, U.S. carbon emissions today would be almost one-fourth of what they are currently. These numbers are estimated by taking the average yearly increase from 1971 to 1989 in nuclear generating capacity and projecting it to the current day, and since these numbers are only one-fourth of the original planned capacity, the result is multiplied by four. In case you think my numbers are fanciful, let’s see if there are any countries out there that did not get entirely persuaded by the anti-nuclear hysteria, and how that affected their carbon emissions.
After the energy crisis of the 70s, France, which was highly dependent on imported oil for electricity production, decided to divest themselves of Middle Eastern oil dependence. Lacking significant fossil fuel deposits, they opted for a nuclear infrastructure. Today nuclear power generates about 78% of France’s electrical power supply, and it is today the world’s largest exporter of electrical energy. France alone accounts for 47% of Western Europe’s nuclear generated electricity (3).
While we do not see the production in France dropping to half of its 1970s levels as we would have in the U.S. had it continued the transition to a nuclear infrastructure, nevertheless the 40% reductions are close and tremendously significant.
Consider from the presented information what the total potential nuclear generating capacity for the US would be if it sustained the high level growth and achieved its planned capacity.
By the year 2000, the US nuclear infrastructure could have been generating 100% of the domestic electrical supply. This is not an extraordinary claim considering, again, that France generates 78% of electrical energy from nuclear power.
Extrapolating this to the global climate, let’s take a look at the global carbon emissions levels and compare them against a world where the U.S. sustained the first two decades of its nuclear infrastructure growth perpetually and ultimately achieved the original planned capacity.
In green, we see the existing global carbon emissions levels and in purple is the U.S. carbon emission levels if it continued to adopt a nuclear infrastructure. In red then, as a result, we see the global carbon levels would have been almost 15% lower than current levels.
I invite readers to extrapolate then where the total global carbon emissions would be if all the post-industrialized nations had adopted nuclear power – as their natural technological progressions would have dictated – if it were not for the hijacking of this process by anti-scientific hyperbole by scaremongering environmental activists. Many organizations – such as Green Peace, still ardently oppose nuclear power. And these levels, mind you, are only about one-tenth of what the Atomic Energy Commission was projecting based on demand during the 60s, where at its height 25 new nuclear power plants were being built every year, and the AEC anticipated that by the year 2000 over 1,000 nuclear power plants would be in operation in the U.S.. Today only 104 operate.
Let us project an educated guess as to what the resulting reduction in carbon emissions would have been had the European Union (which in 2005 generated 15% of their electricity with nuclear) Japan (34.5% nuclear) and finally, going into the future China and India as they fully industrialize.
All of these facts lead to one conclusion: if manmade global warming is a real problem, then it was in fact caused by environmental alarmism. That is not to say that some environmentalism has not been good, but this atrocious abandonment of reason hangs as an ominous cloud over everything environmentalists advocate. Rational environmentalists, such as James Lovelock, who want a high standard of living for humans and a clean planet are quick to change their minds about nuclear power. Irrational environmentalists who actually do not desire wealthy, comfortable lives for all people on the planet–as well as a clean planet–actively oppose nuclear power. Nuclear power is a litmus test for integrity within the environmentalist community.
If you want to spur the economy, stop global warming, and undermine the oil-fueled, terrorist-breeding, murderous theocracies of the world, the solution is simple: build nuclear power plants.
– Sources –
Energy Information Administration – http://www.eia.doe.gov/
US Electrical Generation Sources by Type – http://www.clean-coal.info/drupal/node/164
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) – http://cdiac.ornl.gov/
CDIAC US Carbon Emissions – http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/emissions/usa.dat
CDIAC France Carbon Emissions – http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/fra.html
(1) – “18.6 billion MW•h (Megawatt hours) of electrical power have been generated by nuclear sources” – Energy Information Administration – http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/mer/pdf/pages/sec8_3.pdf
(2) – “every kW•h of electricity generated by coal produces 2.095 lbs of CO2” – US Department of Energy “Carbon Dioxide Emissions from the Generation of Electrical Power in the United States” – http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/co2emiss00.pdf
(3) – Al Gore (2009). Our Choice, Bloomsbury, p. 157.
(4) – “France alone accounts for 47% of western Europe’s nuclear generated electricity” – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2008 World Nuclear Industry Status Report, http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/reports/2008-world-nuclear-industry-status-report/2008-world-nuclear-industry-status-re-1
JFD, your argument about thermal efficiency is irrelevant. Coal has alternative uses to power generation, as does natural gas. Uranium does not.
Your argument of catastrophic accident record is equally irrelevant. All that matters is total fatalities per unit energy generated over time, which makes coal about two orders of magnitude more hazardous than nuclear.
Dave Springer: your repeated propaganda about the hazards of uranium mining is false. The industrial accident rate for uranium miners globally is about half the industrial average.
Galvanium: nuclear proliferation exists as a problem regardless of whether or not nuclear power is used for electricity generation. And it is not diminished one iota if all nuclear power generation is removed from service. Production of nuclear weapons has nothing to do with power generation reactors.
Stephen Wilde: there are no sensible non-nuclear alternative options to nuclear and fossil fuels even conceptually. Hence they will not be available within our lifetimes.
Scott Covert: please outline what you think the nuclear subsidies are. You should be aware that all nuclear power plant operators shoulder the full cost of building, operating and maintaining, and decommissioning a nuclear plant. In addition, they must pay the full cost of used fuel disposal.
You should also be aware that France built its nuclear fleet solely for economic reasons. The cost of imported coal was much higher than nuclear when the transportation infrastructure required was included. Coal is cheaper than nuclear when it is readily available and close at hand or can be offloaded by ship. When long land transportation distances are involved, the cost starts to become excessive. Even in the 1990s, coal fired generation was more expensive than nuclear, given the transport costs. Electricity generation economics are wholly situational and dependent upon access and distance from fuel sources.
Roger Sowell: you seem to want to consider second order effects because you don’t like the fact that hydraulic energy kills about an order of magnitude more people than does nuclear. Dams do indeed prevent flooding but there is a difference between power dams and flood control dams, as the most trivial examination of Hydro Quebec’s James Bay project would show. You’ve posed a what-if that cannot be seriously quantified. I can just as easily suggest that all a power dam does is magnify the damage when it ruptures, causing an enormous number of fatalities all at once rather than scattering them over time.
JP says:
March 30, 2011 at 4:40 am
Is anyone who is pro-nuclear actually aware that accidents like the one in Fukishima are supposedly happening every 17000 years, according to Official Doctrine, and that we have already witnessed 4 (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Mayak, Fukushima) over the last 42 years, not to mention a far larger number of near-accidents?
That means that the statistics are wrong and misguiding. Let’s assume more realistically with a maximum likelihood approach on the basis of the empirical data we have now that roughly every 15 years (if we optimistially assume that 3 Mile Island wasn’t too bad in its consequences), we will render large areas of our planet uninhabitable, and then have to guard these areas for centuries, and they still cause nasty disease and genetic defects in the population. Every 15 years on average. Now, do you still like the nuclear option?
JP: Your statement that accidents like Fukushima occur every 17000 years is erroneous. What that number represents is what is called “a recurrence interval” which is simply the probability that such an accident will occur in any year. 1/17000=5.88^-5 (0.006%/year) Keep in mind that number stays the same every year. That’s a pretty low probability that such an event is likely to occur in any given year. Does that mean it could happen? Sure it could. Is it likely to happen? Probably not.
As someone pointed out above the area around Chernobyl is recovering nicely; although it is not recommended that one live inside the exclusion zone for very long. Most of the really nasty radiation decay products have fairly short half-lives, which means within 5 half-life cycles you are down to about 3% of what you originally started with. The high level radiation producers (the ones with half-lives measured in tenss-of-thousands of years)are in the form of solid waste and are not moving any where soon. That very miniscule percent of the Earth’s surface will be off limits to humans for many centuries. We are not talking about large portions of the Earth being uninhabitable.
But I want the world to be a warmer place. How can we warm it up without CO2?
I would take nuke power even at the cost of wind or solar.
At least I know the nuke will give constant electrons to run my stuff.
Not so with wind or solar.
Raise the construction and operational safety standards and it will still be cheaper and better than green machines.
All this assumes the nuke industry is telling the truth about risks and deaths. In fact, they understate deaths by a thousand to 10 million-fold. That is a far bigger lie than even global warming. The arguments presented in this article and others like it lead me to suspect that the nuclear industry may be the culprits behind the global warming scare.
But the real stakes are far beyond money. Carbon dioxide can turn Earth’s vast deserts green, providing both food for everyone and a huge increase in flora, fauna and biodiversity.
Nuclear power did so much damage to the Soviet Union besides the 90,000 or so sarcophagus workers who died from their efforts, that life expectacy was cut five years–and the Soviet Union collapsed.
Nuclear damage to the thyroid causes brain damage. This is not necessarily so severe that you have a death or an institutionalized case. Smaller IQ drops must logically be far more common. In fact, this was proven by Ernest Sternglass from the 1978 American SAT’s. The drop in scores was most serious at the highest levels.
Almost everyone reading this has a slight decrease in his/her own brain power as a result of fallout from bomb testing and nuclear power plants. The exceptions are both over 65 AND lucky enough to have been exposed to little fallout after birth–or blessed with genes that benefitted from the radiation.
Dave Springer,
Actually only breeder reactors produce plutonium, the stuff nuclear arms are made of. Almost all commercial nuclear reactors for power generation are PWR’sand BWR’s which don’t produce plutonium.
Navy Bob,
There is the Boone Pickens solution: convert to natural gas for transportation, use other, in this case nuclear, for electrical generation. For the US this would result in a reduction in petroleum consumption.
In the extreme, imagine all land on the planet completely covered wall to wall with structures kept at a comfortable 70F / 21C . All heating / cooling would be from Nuclear Power. Would that cause the planet to warm ? I think yes. Is that bad ? I say no.
In the winter, the buildings would warm the air around / above them. The nuke plant would also put out excess heat to the system. In the summer, the buildings will cool hotter air around them, like on the desert, but would not reduce any net gain of heat from the sun into the system because that same heat just comes out the air conditioner exhaust. Again the nuke plant puts out more heat during it’s process.
Having people on the planet doing work and being comfortable is going to use energy that can’t help but add heat to the system. Warmers need to relax as any human activity will cause some warming by just the physics involved. In addition to us though, the planet is still warming from the last ice age anyway, which is beyond our control. A resulting equilibrium from the additional heat automatically occurs naturally and is nothing to be concerned with. Can’t we all just get along? Forget Global Warming and Climate Change. It can’t be stopped or controlled anyway.
Maybe an alternative for hysterical humans is to return to shivering in caves, like in Afghanistan. I’ll pass on that option, my feet get too cold…
the anti-nuke ignorance on display in these comments is astounding …
what a bunch of terrifed little children who go around all day saying “what if” to shoot down anything …
you all most likely drive a car daily, drink alchohol weekly, take asprin occasionally and use a furnace during the winter … I could “what if” all those activities to death and scare you off the roads, out of your favorite bars, cause you to suffer thru your next pain and have you freeze thru the next winter … but I won’t … because I can manage to control my fear of “what if” unknowns … you should try it …
I disagree with the premise implied by the title of the article. The data presented certainly shows that had we shifted much of our electricity production to nuclear power we would have released a substantially smaller amount of CO2 to the atmosphere. Whether the released CO2 caused a significant part of the warming observed last century is a point constantly being debated here at WUWT. While I appreciate the advantages of nuclear power I am not sure that the nuclear power industry is willing and/or able to invest in plants whose safety is commensurate with the magnitude of the environmental threat that they pose. At this point I think it is also important to remember that it was the nuclear power supporters both in Government and outside of it who started the AGW hysteria a long time ago. It is no coincidence that an Office of Climate Research was established at the US Dept. of Energy in 1978, said office being the founder of the AGW research gravy train that has produced the situation we all live through today.
What’s the color of a natural gas flame again?
I don’t want to see that on the highway(s) …
.
There are also second order effects because energy prices would be lower – the existing fleet of nuclear power plants in the US produces power for 2c/kWh.
More households would use electric heat instead of gas or oil and the adoption of electric transport options would be a bit faster.
The key is to fix the NRC. They are the reason that an AP100 built in the US is expected to cost 4x as much as the exact same plant built in China.
What a pathetic text. So we are seeing in WUWT the same tricks we are seeing in G.Warming sites and MSM media. Wonderful…
Fixing the headline for you:
“Anti-Nuclear Power Hysteria and its Significant Contribution to
Global WarmingAtmospheric CO2″— since it’s unclear whether the extra CO2 actually does any harm. Warm is Good!
Well, maybe not in Phoenix in June….
Thanks for an interesting article.
>>HenryP says: March 30, 2011 at 3:59 am
>>Nobody in their right mind would still want to propogate nuclear
>>energy. Rather stick to using natural gas. The extra carbon dioxide
>>is just fine!
Gas from where? From Algeria? From Russia? From Israel?
Have you ever heard of energy security? Have you ever considered being held to ransom during a bitterly cold winter, just like Ukraine was a few years ago?
The advantage of nuclear, is that we can stockpile a couple of year’s supply, just in case. Try doing that with gas. And let’s not reconsider the proposal for storing gas in Cheshire salt mines – I am not living on top of a potential gas blowout (the salt seams were shown to leak a little).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyMbaZ9FVjA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xvyh8jXugE8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEQwYryyIWA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyU-LbUq9n4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79jSl-0GSmg&feature=related
Fase facts. Energy is dangerous, it is in the nature of the beast. Best we understand the forces involved and tame and constrain them to the best of our ability.
The very worst thing we could do is either be held to ransom, because of an over reliance on foreign fossil fuels – or to be becalmed in a month of calm winds that reduces renewable energy to a mere trickle.
These are the wind charts for Liverpool Bay for January-February 2010, one of the coldest periods in British history.
http://coastobs.pol.ac.uk/cobs/met/hilbre/sadata_met_month.php?code=5&span=jan2010
http://coastobs.pol.ac.uk/cobs/met/hilbre/sadata_met_month.php?code=5&span=feb2010
The blue line is the sustained wind speed, and anything less than 7kts not supplying any worthwhile electrical power. Here we see more than a month – a full 40 days – without any significant wind, and so without any significant wind- or wave-inspired electrical power. Had we been relying on wind/wave power during this period, Britain would have ground to a halt and hundreds of thousands would have died – especially the old and the infirm.
This is the seriousness of the decisions we now have to make.
.
Very wrong.
Weapons can be produced from uranium. One of those dropped on Japan in WWII was a uranium weapon. The same equipment and process that enriches uranium for reactor fuel can further enrich it for weapon fuel.
All uranium reactors produce plutonium. The question is the isotope mix – Pu-239/Pu-240. Pu-240 has a high rate of spontaneous fission and isn’t well suited for nuclear weapons although there’s controversy over just how much is too much. Under 7% is desirable for greatest yield but more than that just reduces the yield and increases the poisoning of the blast area by spreading plutonium all over the place (gives it more of a “dirty bomb” flavor). A highly destructive dirty bomb can be made from the normal Pu isotope mix in normal spent PWR and BWR fuel.
However, all you have to do to get high quality weapons grade Pu-239 from a PWR or BWR reactor is remove the fuel after about 4 months of operation. Pu-240 accumulates in the fuel at a much slower rate than Pu-239 so by removing the fuel early for Pu extraction you get a 93% or better mix of Pu-239.
You should really educate yourself on these matters before writing about them!
Francisco says:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/30/anti-nuclear-power-hysteria-and-it%e2%80%99s-significant-contribution-to-global-warming/#comment-632638
I knew nuclear was not safe – there are just too many things that can go wrong, especially with the waste.
in fact, one of the reasons why I started to study “global warming” was people starting to push for nuclear as the best possible ” alternative” for fossil fuel.
I am afraid we have not seen the end of Fukishima yet- the worst is still to come.
The whole plant needs to be encapsulated but you cannot go near. I think the helicopter pilots who threw that water on already got too much radiation. The poor workers at Chernobyl had the same problem. They did their best to encapsulate it and have all died since. Unfortunately they failed – it now still needs to be re-encapsulated but the country does not have the money for it.
Better stick to natural gas, or, like you suggest, use coal and then remove the heavy metals, CO and SO2.
We agree on the fact that more CO2 is just fine! The bigger your carbon footprint the better it is for nature.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
[[[vboring says:
March 30, 2011 at 12:16 pm
…The key is to fix the NRC. They are the reason that an AP100 built in the US is expected to cost 4x as much as the exact same plant built in China.]]]
Most of the Native Americans appear to have originated from China. It could be argued that the entire “New World” should belong to China as the “Motherland”. That argument not withstanding, by the way China takes on our debt, they will eventually own a good chunk of the US anyway.
Let China build the plants over here, it’s “their” land. (semi-sarc)
We have somewhat lost our direction and common sense, politically, financially, and technologically (plus a few more). We can get our focus back, but it’s a fight against ingrained entrenched bureaucratic irrationality and stupidity. It only takes “a few good brains” to reverse it… and I see a few of them are here on WUWT.
The phrase “Let’s roll” seems appropriate here…
Nomen Nescio:
I think more specifically, the solution is best defined by Robert Bryce — Natural gas (short term) to nuclear, preferably Gen IV design (longer term). See his book, Power Hungry. http://robertbryce.com/node/343
Gilbert K. Arnold says:
JP: Your statement that accidents like Fukushima occur every 17000 years is erroneous. What that number represents is what is called “a recurrence interval” which is simply the probability that such an accident will occur in any year. 1/17000=5.88^-5 (0.006%/year) Keep in mind that number stays the same every year. That’s a pretty low probability that such an event is likely to occur in any given year. Does that mean it could happen? Sure it could. Is it likely to happen? Probably not.
Gilbert, if the probability per year is 1/17000 the statistical expectation according to so-called frequentist notions of probability is that, on average, this type of accident will occur once every 17000 years.
If in fact the 1/17000 value were correct (which I don’t believe, for reasons about to become clear), the probability of such an event occurring 3 times in 42 years (which actually happened in reality), would be about 2.34*10^-9. That is very very small. So what this tells us is that either the number of 1/17000 is way too small, or reality is wrong.
JP
@Norman Nescio (con’t)
Light water reactors (LWR) are said to be “proliferation resistant”. This is because an LWR must be shut down to remove the fuel. If a gigawatt LWR reactor producing electricity commercially is shut down after just 4 months of operation it is difficult to impossible to hide the early shutdown from the IEAA. PWR and BWR reactors can have fuel rods surreptitiously removed early without shutting down the reactor and thus it is far more difficult for the IEAA to detect that activity.
FWIW now you know and hopefully won’t the mistake of thinking that only specialized nuclear reactors can be used to generate weapons grade plutonium.
Also not true. Plutonium usable for nuclear weapons is ONLY produced in specialized plutonium generator reactors. The reason is the high purity required for weaponizable Pu. It has to be better than 99% pure Pu239, otherwise the bomb won’t work. Neither regular uranium reactors nor breeder reactors can produce that. In normal Uranium reactors the generated small amount of Plutonium is a highly diverse mix of all kinds of Plutonium isotopes, which cannot be separated (enriched) to extract Pu239 only. Breeder reactors of course are designed to produce Plutonium from the otherwise unused Uranium 238 (99.3% of natural Uranium), but at the same time it is generated in a breeder, also fissions to create power.
Of course Thorium reactors don’t produce Pu. But they do produce Uranium 233, which could be used to make a bomb, but if you would try to take enough material out of the reactor to make one, the reactor would stop before you had enough collected. And that material would be contaminated with U232 (not separable from the U233), which decays quickly to highly radioactive daughter products that would kill any would-be bomb maker before he gets a bomb assembled or transported.
[[[Ralph says:
March 30, 2011 at 12:40 pm ]]]
Ralph, a lot of those fireballs look just like the surface of the sun.
It’s not ironic that the sun is where all that energy originally came from… combined with life itself. All fossil fuels are a gift from the sun, a nuclear furnace.
We could not have developed our civilizations without fossil fuels, and we still need them in large quantities, even to transition to alternate sources of energy. They are a blessing.
We must respect any form of energy’s power and toxicity. At breakfast, I never drink a glass of gasoline to get me started… I know it would kill me, but it’s great for the car. Good judgment and operational designs of systems rule the day here.
Michael . . . . “total U.S. carbon emissions since 1900.” if that is so . . . big deal . . . that would make it is a cumulative chart . . . if not it should say annualized . . . . and still kind of a no big deal . . . look at poplulation . . .
I will check your site but, it would be nice if it was just a link to the source . . .
vboring says:
March 30, 2011 at 12:16 pm
“There are also second order effects because energy prices would be lower – the existing fleet of nuclear power plants in the US produces power for 2c/kWh.”
That’s nonsense. Combined cycle natural gas produces electricity for close to half the price of nuclear ($0.69/mwh vs. $1.14/mwh). Conventional coal comes in at $0.95/mwh. I don’t know what costs you’re leaving out but they must be huge. You’re probably only comparing the cost of the fuel which is a large fraction of the cost of running a gas or coal plant and only a small fraction of a nuclear plant. The capital, maintenance, and decommissioning costs are what drives up the price of nuclear generated electricity.
Basing decisions for the future of direction of power generation on how it impacts the level of CO2 is the last thing we should do. The real issues are finding low cost production methods which are simple to operate and safe.
After the Fukushima disaster, nuclear will only be developed if a way can be found to safely dispose of (or reprocess) the spent fuel and a better system for containment is developed to keep all radioactivity within the plant when (not if) things go wrong.
Without these conditions being met there will be no new reactors projects being started in the West, politics and common sense will ensure this.