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The nuclear lobby failed its goal for Paris climate agreement

Paris Fails to Revive the Nuclear Dream, Ecowatch  Paul Brown, Climate News Network | December 31, 2015 In Paris, in early December, the advocates of nuclear power made yet another appeal to world leaders to adopt their technology as central to saving the planet from dangerous climate change.

Yet analysis of the plans of 195 governments that signed up to the Paris agreement, each with their own individual schemes on how to reduce national carbon emissions, show that nearly all of them exclude nuclear power.

Only a few big players—China, Russia, India, South Korea and the United Kingdom—still want an extensive program of new–build reactors.

To try to understand why this is so the U.S.-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asked eight experts in the field to look at the future of nuclear power in the context of climate change.

One believed that large-scale new-build nuclear power “could and should” be used to combat climate change and another thought nuclear could play a role, although a small one. The rest thought new nuclear stations were too expensive, too slow to construct and had too many inherent disadvantages to compete with renewables.

Industry in Distress

Amory Lovins, co-founder and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, produced a devastating analysis saying that the slow-motion decline of the nuclear industry was simply down to the lack of a business case.

The average nuclear reactor, he wrote, was now 29 years old and the percentage of global electricity generated continued to fall from a peak of 17.6 percent in 1996 to 10.8 percent in 2014. “Financial distress stalks the industry,” wrote Lovins.

Lovins says nuclear power now costs several times more than wind or solar energy and is so far behind in cost and building time that it could never catch up.

The full details of what he and other experts said are on the Bulletin’s site, with some of their comments below……..

M.V. Ramana, of the Nuclear Futures Laboratory and the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, was dismissive. “There are still some who hope that nuclear power will magically undergo a massive expansion within a relatively short period of time.”

”The evidence so far suggests that this is a false hope, one that is best abandoned if we are to deal with climate change with the seriousness the problem demands.”

Peter Bradford, adjunct professor at Vermont Law School and former Nuclear Regulatory Commission member, agreed: “Climate change, so urgent and so seemingly intractable, has become the last refuge of nuclear charlatans throughout the Western world.”

He said James Hansen, perhaps the most visible of the climate scientists who advocate heavy reliance on breeder or other innovative reactor designs, did so without paying any attention to their track record of long and costly failure…… http://ecowatch.com/2015/12/31/paris-fails-nuclear-dream/

December 31, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change