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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Wharf Rat who wrote (129611)1/29/2010 1:34:32 PM
From: Wharf Rat  Respond to of 542009
 
As you can see, every step of the nuclear power cycle involves the expenditure of energy derived from fossil fuels, which nuclear electricity cannot replace. Thus it is untrue to say that nuclear energy is greenhouse friendly.
In the paper "Nuclear Power : the energy balance" by J.W. Storm and P. Smith (2005) download here, the authors calculate that with high quality ores, the CO2 produced by the full nuclear life cycle is about one half to one third of an equivalent sized gas-fired power station.
For low quality ores (less than 0.02% of U3O8 per tonne of ore), the CO2 produced by the full nuclear life cycle is EQUAL TO that produced by the equivalent gas-fired power station.

So the question is : Given that the greenhouse claims for nuclear power are false, and if the only way the nuclear industry can operate is with massive amounts of cheap fossil fuels, especially diesel derived from oil, and with oil going to be very much scarcer in the future, is this a good time to be thinking of increasing the nuclear industry ?
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