nuclear-news

 NuClear news, February 2015 Keith Barnham Emeritus Professor of Physics at Imperial College says claims that nuclear power is a ‘low carbon’ energy source fall apart under scrutiny.

Far from coming in at six grams of CO2 per unit of electricity for Hinkley C, as the Climate Change Committee believes, the true figure is probably well above 50 grams – breaching the CCC’s recommended limit for new sources of power generation beyond 2030.

He says given the difficulties it is entirely possible that the planned Hinkley C reactor will not be completed until 2030 or beyond. It will then be subsidised for the first 35 years of its projected 60 year lifetime – taking us through until 2090.

In a recent paper in Energy Policy, Daniel Nugent and Benjamin Sovacool critically reviewed the published Life Cycle Analyses of renewable electricity generators. All the renewable technologies came in below the 50gCO2/kWh limit. The lowest was large-scale hydropower with a carbon footprint one fifth of the CCC limit (10 gCO2/kWh). A close second was biogas electricity from anaerobic digestion (11 gCO2/kWh). The mean figure for wind energy is 34 gCO2/kWh, and solar PV comes in a shade under the 50g limit, at 49.9 gCO2/kWh. Bear in mind that rapidly evolving PV technology means that this last figure is constantly falling.

There have been nearly three hundred papers on the carbon footprint of nuclear power in scientific journals and reports in recent years. Two peer-reviewed papers have critically assessed the literature in the way Nugent and Sovacool compared renewable LCAs. The first was by Benjamin Sovacool himself. He reviewed 103 published LCA studies and filtered them down to 19, which had an acceptably rigorous scientific approach. The carbon footprints ranged from 3 to 200gCO2/kWh. The average carbon footprint was 66gCO2/kWh, which is above the CCC limit. Barnham says his conclusion from looking at the eight most rigorous LCAs is that it is as likely that the carbon footprint of nuclear is above 50 gCO2/kWh as it is below.

 The evidence so far in the scientific literature cannot clarify whether the carbon footprint of nuclear power is below the limit which all electricity generation should respect by 2030 according to the CCC. The variation in the nuclear carbon footprint seems to result from assumptions about the greenhouse emissions of the energy mix used to produce the nuclear fuel. And the carbon footprint of nuclear power depends strongly on the concentration of the uranium in the ore. The inescapable fact is that the lower the concentration of uranium in the ore, the higher the fossil fuel energy required to extract uranium.

Barnham’s survey of the scientific literature suggests that it is quite possible that the carbon footprint of Hinkley Point C could be as high as that of electricity generation from natural gas before it closes in 2090. Meanwhile, Steve Kidd, an independent nuclear consultant who used to work for the World Nuclear Association says the climate change argument may not be the best argument to use to promote the nuclear industry. The other benefits of nuclear power such as reliability and security of supply deserve more emphasis. He says nuclear advocates have failed to make much progress with gaining public acceptance over the past few years. He wants to abandon climate change as a prime argument for supporting a much higher use of nuclear power. (2) http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/nuclearnews/NuClearNewsNo71.pdf