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the carbon footprint of nuclear war

The carbon footprint of nuclear war
The Guardian Duncan Clarke 2 January 2009 Almost 700m tonnes of CO2 would be released into the Earth’s atmosphere by even the smallest nuclear conflict, according to a US study that compares the environmental costs of developing various power sources Just when you might have thought it was ethically sound to unleash a nuclear attack on a nearby city, along comes a pesky scientist and points out that atomic warfare is bad for the climate.

 According to a new paper in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, even a very limited nuclear exchange, using just a thousandth of the weaponry of a full-scale nuclear war, would cause up to 690m tonnes of CO2 to enter the atmosphere – more than UK’s annual total.The upside (kind of) is that the conflict would also generate as much as 313m tonnes of soot. This would stop a great deal of sunlight reaching the earth, creating a significant regional cooling effect in the short and medium terms – just like when a major volcano erupts. Ultimately, though, the CO2 would win out and crank up global temperatures an extra few notches…………………
……………The purpose of the paper is to compare the total human and environmental costs of a wide range of different power sources, from solar and wind to nuclear and biofuels.

One of the side-effects of nuclear power, the report argues, is an increased risk of nuclear war: “Because the production of nuclear weapons material is occurring only in countries that have developed civilian nuclear energy programs, the risk of a limited nuclear exchange between countries or the detonation of a nuclear device by terrorists has increased due to the dissemination of nuclear energy facilities worldwide.”…………..

………it’s interesting to note that nuclear looks very bad in the report even if you ignore the warfare component of the carbon footprint. Far more serious (by a factor of 15 to 25) is nuclear’s opportunity cost: the emissions savings lost during the decades of planning and building of each nuclear station.

January 3, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized