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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (5047)	11/20/2006 1:04:39 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 10087

And according to the research principal at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, Chris Riedy, it could take seven years for the reactor to break even on its energy consumption - that is, to produce enough electricity free of greenhouse gas to make up for the coal-fired power expended to dig up the uranium for fuel and to build the reactor. Assuming the claim isn't just outright false, its still not all that meaningful. The plant runs for longer than 7 years. More importantly if you don't build the nuclear plant presumably you would have to build a coal plant or another type of plant. You use energy to build that plant. Even if you don't build another plant instead of the nuclear plant and you just burn more coal in existing plants, you have to dig a lot more coal to power the plant then the uranium you would have to dig for a nuclear plant. They are counting the indirect CO2 production from the nuclear plant but not counting indirect CO2 production associated with other sources of electricity.