Thanks for posting that.
The nukes use MORE carbon argument seems to have some bad assumptions.
The energy return on energy investment is very high with nukes - somewhere around 40 : 1 - so the reduction of carbon use should be similar to the energy return.
That's a top level argument, based on the evaluations of various economists.
A conventional power plant uses fuel, which is either natural gas (mostly methane, CH4), oil (hydrocarbons) or coal (coal is rumoured to contain carbon).
They seem to be pretending the 'conventional' plant uses conventions or something...
Let's dig into the pieces -
Mining - I don't see why Uranium takes more energy than other forms of metal mining, like copper or moly. Coal will have some economy of scale, but that is maybe less than 40% - and of course we mine about only a small percent of the tonnage of coal.
Purification (a very odd word choice here, the industry uses refining). Maybe for pegmatite ores with lots of rare earths. For the majority of yellowcake, process out the Vanadium and usually iron.
Isotope separation - this is the big one of course. This process uses electricity, not carbon per se. So if we use hydro power from water that was going over the dam anyway, there's no carbon. In France, where 80% of the electricity comes from nuclear, there's no carbon.
Disposal (should be reprocessing) Again, this takes electricity.
Decommisioning - this is likely to take more energy than construction, and lots of diesel. Still a small fraction of the energy delivered.
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My take - there are a number of pro-nuke environmnetalists, and anti-nuke environmentalist. Many environmentalists are moving to a pro-nuke or at least neutral position. The anti-nuke crowd is running out of arguments, and is grasping at straws. Recently we saw arguments for "Peak Uranium". There's lot of uranium, as we will find out in about 4 years as all the new mines start up.
I expect the anti-nukes will keep trying arguments until they find some that get some traction. I also expect they will go back to scare tactics, maybe tell the world how France now suffers from radioactive cheese. |
