nuclear-news

Greenhouse emissions by nuclear industry – the facts are obscured

Most studies,.. obscure the complexity and variation inherent in the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the nuclear lifecycle rather than explaining it…..

Nuclear Industry Must Be Transparent on Uranium Mining, Carbon Output Before New Plants, The Energy Collective, by David Thorpe,  July 19, 2011 ”….significant grounds for concern.  In this piece I will discuss firstly uranium mining and then the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the nuclear power life cycle before asking – if this industry has nothing to hide – why isn’t it more transparent?…

..The Carbon Impact of Nuclear Power Sovacool examined 103 lifecycle studies, but found that 81% had methodological shortcomings.

The main argument behind the nuclear renaissance is that nuclear power is low carbon.If this were so, you would expect there to be comprehensive data to back up this claim. Unfortunately, this, too, seems to be lacking.

There is but one reliable study which has examined all of the existing studies on the life-cycle carbon impact of nuclear power stations. This is a paper from August 2008 by B.K. Sovacool, Valuing the greenhouse gas emissions for nuclear power: A critical survey, published in Energy Policy, Volume 36, Issue 8, pp. 2950-2963.

It shows that compared to the renewable energy sources, nuclear electricity generation performs worse in terms of carbon emissions

Of the remaining 19% of studies that were relatively up to date, accessible, and methodologically explicit, they varied greatly in their comprehensiveness, and so are not comparable.

Studies differed in whether they assessed future emissions for a few individual reactors or past emissions for the global nuclear fleet; assumed existing technologies or those under development; and presumed whether the electricity needed for mining and enrichment came from fossil fuels, other nuclear plants, renewable energy technologies, or a combination thereof……

July 19, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change