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Nuclear dangerous and ineffective against climate change

Nuclear debate: A dangerous option that wont solve climate change Green Left  Jim Green 25 October 2009 There are three main problems with the nuclear “solution” to climate change — it is a blunt instrument, a dangerous one, and it is unnecessary.First, nuclear power could at most make a modest contribution to climate change abatement. The main limitation is that it is used almost exclusively for electricity generation, which accounts for about one-quarter of global greenhouse emissions.
Doubling global nuclear power output by mid-century at the expense of coal would reduce greenhouse emissions by about 5%.

According to the 2006 Switkowski report, building six nuclear reactors in Australia would reduce Australia’s emissions by 4% if they displaced coal, or 2% if they displaced gas. …………….

nuclear power is unnecessary, as physicist Amory Lovins explained in a recent paper: “Expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection.

“That’s because — the empirical cost and installation data show — new nuclear power is so costly and slow that … it will save about 2–20 times less carbon per dollar, and about 20–40 times less carbon per year, than investing instead in the market winners — efficient use of electricity and … micropower, comprising distributed renewables (renewables with mass-produced units, i.e. those other than big hydro dams) and cogenerating electricity together with useful heat in factories and buildings.”…………….

As Diesendorf says: “On top of the perennial challenges of global poverty and injustice, the two biggest threats facing human civilisation in the 21st century are climate change and nuclear war. It would be absurd to respond to one by increasing the risks of the other. Yet that is what nuclear power does.”

Green Left – Nuclear debate: A dangerous option that wont solve climate change (Jim Green)

October 26, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 1, climate change | antinuclear, AUSTRALIA, climate change, Copenhagen, nuclear, nuclear spin, renewables