nuclear-news

Exposing nuclear lobby’s false claims at Paris Climate Summit

Nuclear energy struggles to find its voice at COP21 conference, France 24, 8 Dec 15 

  “………Jan Haverkamp, who authored the Greenpeace briefing, said the claim that nuclear energy was essential for reaching global warming targets was utterly false.

“There are now piles of scenarios that include different options for reaching decarbonisation targets that do not include nuclear energy,” he told FRANCE 24 by telephone from Poland. “To say that it cannot be done is a total PR strategy”.

In regard to the absence of debate about nuclear energy at the COP 21, Haverkamp said only a handful of delegations still believed nuclear had any long-term future in their countries.

He said that even countries that will continue to use nuclear power, like France and China, are broadly shifting resources away from this sector.

“The nuclear energy sector is facing very hard economic times,” the energy consultant said. “They will increasingly struggle to update their fleet, and do not know how to finance new projects”.

Cost curves

While the physicist David disagreed with Haverkamp about the ability to phase out nuclear energy and fossil fuels simultanously, both agreed that the fate of nuclear energy may be determined by market forces in the end.

In the wake of Fukushima disaster and a new global focus on terrorism, nuclear power plants will have to be both safer and more secure. This will likely increase the cost of nuclear energy in the short term, according to David. At the same time, a massive ramp-up of green technology is expected to bring down renewable energy costs.

David said that current economic trends demanded a quick return on investment, and that the energy sector was not excempt from such expectations.

Nuclear reactors, which he reminded required very high initial investments and only delivered profits a few decades later, were dangerously out of sync with the economic times.

December 9, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general