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Nuclear power is well-disguised fossil fuel

Nuclear power is well-disguised fossil fuel1 Mail and Guardian 30 June 09 …by Roger DiamondAs global warming gets hotter on the international political agenda, and with recent oil price volatility, the nuclear power proponents have jumped on a bandwagon to promote “the peaceful atom” as a means to power our society………………….. Carbon free? When uranium, or any other fissionable material, reacts, indeed, it does not give off any carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gases. However, almost every other aspect of the production of nuclear power does. Let’s start with mining uranium…………………All of this mining, processing and transporting activity uses energy — fossil fuels to be precise. But that’s not even the big energy user in nuclear power. The biggest factor is probably the building of the power stations that have to be over-engineered for terrorist strikes, earthquakes, careless operators………………………..the energy consumed in earth moving, making thousands of tons of cement and building a nuclear power station, is very significant. Maintenance of the power station also consumes energy, as does the transport and disposal of the low and medium-level radioactive waste, but the big unknowns in nuclear power are decommissioning and disposal of high-level nuclear waste.

All of this activity is driven by fossil fuels and so to say that nuclear power is carbon free is to pretend that nuclear power stations descend from the heavens and that fuel rods grow on trees, neither of which are particularly believable. It is also to ignore the challenge that decommissioning and high-level waste disposal pose………………………….he clincher is that all of this adds up to make nuclear power rather expensive and uncertain, and so the predicted boom in nuclear power has not materialised and in fact, the construction of new nuclear power stations is only keeping pace with the decommissioning of old ones built in the 1960s. This is even without the years of expense that we look forward to in guarding and maintaining radioactive hulks of concrete for the rest of civilisation so that they don’t crumble and leak radiation or demolishing the monstrosities and finding a hole to bury them in.

Thought Leader » Peak Oil Perspectives » Nuclear power is well-disguised fossil fuel

June 30, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change, environment | antinuclear, nuclear, radioactive