Exposing nuclear hype about global warming
Nuclear instability
ON LINE opinion By Helen Caldicott, 14 August 2009
Australia seems determined to lead the way to an unstable world which could result in two very different outcomes – global warming or nuclear winter. We burn and export coal in massive amounts producing more CO2 per capita than any other country and we are about to become one of the world’s major uranium exporters. Kevin Rudd remains wedded to the coal industry and the ALP now totally supports uranium mining.
Global warming is a condition that has recently brought great benefits to the nuclear industry.
The Nuclear Energy Institute in the US has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in a massive propaganda campaign to convince Americans, and indeed the world, that nuclear power is the answer to global warming, because it makes no greenhouse gases, it is clean, cheap and sustainable. These four claims are patently absurd.
Attractive ads touting such nonsense appear on regular occasions in the New Yorker, Scientific American, the Washington Post, and Capitol Hill publications such as Roll Call, Congress Daily AM and The Hill and on national public radio.
The truth is that very few people or organisations have calculated the true energetic cost of nuclear electricity which involves a massive industrial infrastructure including uranium mining and land reclamation, milling, uranium enrichment, reactor construction and decommissioning, cooling, transportation and ecologically safe storage of intensely radioactive waste, and ecologically safe storage of thousands of tons of waste over geological time frames.
As an illustration we will examine the energy output of the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle – mining, milling and enrichment. The back end from reactor construction to radioactive waste storage is also a high CO2 emitter.
Various studies show that CO2 emissions from the fossil fuel depend on the grade of the uranium ore – high grade ore requires less energy input than low grade ore.
The vast majority of the world’s uranium reserves are low-grade. Nuclear energy currently supplies 16 per cent of the world’s electricity production, and the high grade reserves will last only one or two decades if nuclear energy production were to be expanded, as the industry hopes.
At least 10 tonnes of low-grade ore containing less than 0.01 per cent uranium must be mined to obtain 1kg of yellowcake, entailing a huge increase in the fossil energy required for mining and milling. Consumption of fossil fuels to mine, mill and enrich low grade ore become so large that nuclear energy will emit comparable quantities of CO2 from an equivalent combined cycle gas-fired plant……..
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