Nuclear power’s hidden emissions
With the welcome focus on climate change and global warming, there has been a renewed push for nuclear power plants. The big argument in favour of nuclear is the claim that they are “zero emissions”. Like coal power plants, they can generate large amounts of power, 24 hours a day. But unlike coal, they don’t actually burn anything, so the power generation (fission) produces no greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.
But nothing is ever that simple! Its quite true that nuclear power plants don’t produce CO2 during power generation, just like solar power, wind power and other renewable sources. But unlike those renewables, nuclear power does require fuel in the form of uranium. And it turns out that uranium is a difficult thing to mine.
Some studies have been done, and it turns out that the act of mining the uranium (digging up the ground, extracting the ore, etc) results in between 10 and 50 tonnes of carbon dioxide being produced for every tonne of uranium oxide extracted. Apparently, your everyday 1000MW nuclear power plant needs 200 tonnes of this uranium oxide a year, so that’s 2,000 to 10,000 tonnes of CO2 emitted, just to get the fuel out of the ground!
And it doesn’t stop there – that fuel has to be transported from the mine to power plant. And once the fuel has been “burnt” and converted to radioactive waste, it has to be transported to a nuclear waste facility. All that transport results in more carbon dioxide emissions, all contributing to climate change.
That’s not to say that nuclear power doesn’t have advantages – it still produces far, far less emissions than a coal power plant. But the claim that nuclear power is “emissions-free” is misleading. By comparison, renewable sources, like solar and wind are truly “emissions-free”. Apart from the emissions involved during their initial construction, they produce their power without emitting carbon dioxide as a by-product.
Categories: energy, environment, green
Tags: emissions, mining, nuclear, renewables
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October 18th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
What you’re referring to here is total lifecycle emissions. In that case, there are a number of studies — both from industry and third-party groups — that have found that nuclear energy is comparable to renewables:
http://www.nei.org/keyissues/protectingtheenvironment/lifecycleemissionsanalysis/
October 19th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Eric,
Lifecycle emissions is exactly what I was talking about (although I didn’t use that term in the post). The main thrust of the post was that the “zero-emissions” claim on nuclear power is incorrect – nuclear will incur an emissions “cost” not only during construction but through its operating life as part of processing its fuel.
Its true that “traditional” renewable sources like wind and solar incur an initial emissions cost too, accounting for construction. Some studies, such as the one you quote, have indeed found that the end-lifecycle emissions (typically in grams of CO2/kwH) are comparable.
But there is a big divergence in numbers in different studies (ain’t it always the way!). A Swedish study (Environmental Inventories for Energy Systems, Final Report, Institute of Energy Technology, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) found that nuclear incurred a lifecycle cost of 39.1 g CO2/kwH – 4 to 8 times more than wind’s cost of between to 5-10g/kwH.
In my opinion, nuclear is definitely better than coal, at least in terms of emissions. But renewable sources are better again, and don’t suffer from the same waste issues, or proliferation issues.