Is nuclear energy environmentally friendly

Answer 1

I know there is a lot of controversy about this but I would say not. I would say it was friendlier than coal or oil in terms of carbon footprint, but neither coal nor oil has the potential for widespread destruction that nuclear has, even in a worst case scenario for global warming.

Proponents of nuclear power point to lack of pollutants and a carbon footprint that is nearly nothing. But there are issues with these ideas, and they ignore a much bigger picture.

First of all, nuclear energy does produce considerable pollution. Uranium mining and refining are destructive to the environments in which they are done. Tailings need to be decontaminated, which is very expensive and uses a lot of oil. In the United States, the enrichment is done in a plant powered by what has been called the dirtiest coal burning plant in the country.

Until about 2004, studies on the nuclear carbon footprint almost never were done on the cradle to grave basis that is standard for a total carbon footprint. They did not include construction, decommissioning, or waste disposal. On that basis, the carbon footprint of nuclear power were given at an average of 13 grams CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour (gCO2e/kWh).

By contrast, the carbon footprint of solar photovoltaic cells was always calculated on the cradle to grave basis, and since the cells used a lot of energy to produce, production leaked traces of highly powerful global warming gasses, and the cells had low efficiency, they were calculated to produce about 105 gCO2e/kWh.

More recent studies do standard total carbon footprint on nuclear, and both the manufacture and efficiency of solar cells have improved. The result is that the more recent information is that solar cells have a carbon footprint of 35 to 40 gCO2e/kWh, and the nuclear footprint is about 90 gCO2e/kWh. By contrast, wind and hydro have about 15-20 gCO2e/kWh and combined cycle natural gas in a cogeneration system has about 445 gCO2e/kWh.

So the carbon footprint of nuclear is about 5 to 6 times that of hydro and wind, about 2.5 times that of solar cells, and about 20% of efficient natural gas.

There is another environmental problem with nuclear, and that is high level nuclear waste. No satisfactory way of dealing with the waste has been developed in the history of nuclear power, over half a century. The US government position is that nuclear waste is dangerous for about a million years. Actually, it will take nuclear waste about six million years to have its radioactivity reduced to the level of naturally occurring uranium ore, which is not all that safe. We do not have a way to guarantee the environmental safety of the waste for even a fraction of that time. It is more than a 1000 times the age of the pyramids, more than 5000 times the age of our oldest politically body, and more than 100,000 times the age of our youngest volcano.

The good news is that renewable energy systems are being developed at an impressive rate.