Can new atomic power reactors really help cut CO2 by 2050?

Nuclear Power Is Not “Green Energy”: It Is a Fount of Atomic Waste Monday, 14 November 2016 00:00 By Arnie Gundersen, Truthout | News Analysis “…….Can new atomic power reactors really help cut CO2 by 2050? Unfortunately, what is past is prologue. The World Nuclear Association claims that 1,000 new nuclear power plants will be needed by 2050 to combat CO2 buildup and climate change. The MIT estimate also assumes 1,000 nuclear power plants must be in operation by 2050. Using the nuclear trade association’s own calculations shows that these new power plants will offset only 3.9 gigatons of CO2 in 2050; 3.9 gigatons out of 64 gigatons is only 6.1 percent of the total CO2 released to the atmosphere in 2050, hardly enough for the salvation of the polar bears.

If those 1,000 nuclear power plants were cheap and could be built quickly, investing in atomic power reactors might still make sense. However, Lazard Financial Advisory and Asset Management, with no dog in the fight, has developed a rubric which estimates that the construction cost of those new power plants will be $8,200,000,000,000. Yes, that’s $8.2 trillion to reduce CO2 by only 6 percent.

21st-Century Opportunities Surely, that huge amount of money can be better spent on less expensive alternatives to get more bang for the buck. Lazard also estimates that solar or wind would be 80 percent less expensive for the equivalent amount of peak electric output.

Atmospheric CO2 releases are not going to go on vacation while waiting for those 1,000 plants to be built. According to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2016, the average construction time for 46 nuclear plants that began operation between 2006 and 2016 was 10.4 years, not including engineering, licensing and site selection.

Contrast that with a two-year design and construction schedule for a typical industrial-scale solar power plant. Atmospheric CO2 levels will increase by almost 70 ppm during the 35 years it will take to construct those 1,000 new nuclear power plants, an increase that they will never eliminate — if they ever operate.

Proponents of nuclear power claim that somehow, sometime in the future, atomic power reactor construction costs will be much lower and construction delays will be a thing of the past. There is no shortage of atomic reactor power ideas, according to the nuclear industry and its lobbyists, when government subsidies are used to fulfill their pipe dreams.

Global climate change is a contemporary problem that requires contemporary solutions. Governments would make the CO2 problem worse by allocating precious resources for nuclear energy to reduce CO2 when the cost of such proposals is unknown and when implementation only begins in 2030. Fortunately, lower-cost renewable solutions are readily available and can be implemented on the necessary time scale needed to reverse the rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2.

Building new nuclear power plants applies a 20th century technology to a 21st century problem. Moreover, building nuclear reactors in a trade-off for CO2 reduction creates a toxic legacy of atomic waste throughout the world. Proponents of nuclear power would have us believe that humankind is smart enough to store nuclear waste for a quarter of a million years, but at the same time, humankind is too ignorant to figure out how to store solar electricity overnight.

Let’s not recreate the follies of the 20th century by recycling this atomic technology into the 21st century. The evidence proves that new nuclear power plants will make global climate change worse due to huge costs and delayed implementation periods. Lift the CO2 smoke screen and implement the alternative solutions that are available now — faster to implement and much less expensive. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38326-nuclear-power-is-not-green-energy-it-is-a-fount-of-atomic-waste