Nuke Emissions Not Zero!

Maine currently has no nuclear power plants. Our only one, Maine Yankee in Wiscasset, was decommissioned in 1997. The decommissioning was done responsibly and on budget.   Today Germany and Switzerland have announced that they are phasing out nuclear power. The Fukushima plant in Japan is still problematic, and predictions from the source suggest it may take a year before the situation is stabilized.

Maine Yankee

Still, we have two big problems in our addiction to oil and fossil fuel derived electricity. The most pressing is global warming and the second is enriching terrorists who happen to have lots of oil, or more accurately, friends and family who finance their jihad with oil money.

Recently I heard a sober discussion of the risks of nuclear power compared to those of coal and natural gas derived electricity. With all the splashy headlines and contaminated land, how can we not conclude that nuclear power is the wrong path? But what about  collapsing coal mines, black lung, widespread asthma, weird weather, rising ocean levels and let’s not forget those terrorists.

One thing that has always bothered me about nuclear power has been the way it is presented as “zero emissions”, as if operators just lean out their windows and pluck a fresh fuel rod from the nuke tree and pop it into the reactor. In reality, there are many, many more power-consuming steps to producing those fuel rods than the industry thinks we should know about. I found a non-industry website, http://www.wise-uranium.org which finally answers this question.  After a session of envelope scrawling and unit conversions, I think I arrived at the true CO2 comparison between the big three ways of making electricity. Missing in this estimate is the energy investment in getting fossil fuels to the power plant. A lump of coal just needs to be transported but uranium has to go through many steps, so proportionally, the energy invested in the fuel rods is more significant. And it’s NOT zero. Here is the result:

1. 

   Ready for demolition

   Coal…..936 metric tonnes of CO2 per gigawatt hour

2. Natural Gas ….581 metric tonnes of CO2 per gigawatt hour
3. Nuclear Fuel …..34.5  metric tonnes of CO2 per gigawatt hour

That means nuclear derived electricity releases 3.6 % of the CO2 emissions of coal and  5.9% of natural gas. This is a typical energy expenditure in fuel rod processing. Somewhat different expenditures would result with lower grade ore or the reprocessing of spent fuel. Also not counted is the end-of-cycle energy investment, like what’s happening now at Maine Yankee. Wouldn’t it be nice if the industry were more forthcoming about these energy costs? Can’t they make their argument a little more honestly? Can we trust an elite, secretive industry to provide us with the real information, or will they continue to chant, “Zero emissions”?

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