Nukes Can Cut Global Warming

Nukes Can Cut Global Warming

Dec 10 - Cincinnati Post

In the battle against global warming, it helps to use nuclear power.

That much is apparent in British Prime Minister Tony Blair's assertion that nuclear power must stay on the energy agenda "if you are serious about the issue of climate change."

Nuclear power now has powerful advocates around the world, who see it as a significant energy source available to avoid environmental catastrophe. The question is whether it can overcome some hurdles to make new plants economically viable.

Already providing 20 percent of the electricity in the United States and 17 percent in the world, nuclear power is not just another way to produce electricity; it's a necessity.

Unlike coal and natural gas, nuclear power emits no carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Renewable energy sources are also carbon-free, but they cannot be readily expanded for large-scale electricity production -- a huge drawback, as experts predict that world electricity demand will double by 2020.

What's clear is that many countries are looking to nuclear power for clean energy:

Finland recently decided to build a fifth nuclear-power plant, citing the greenhouse problem as one of its reasons.

France, which gets 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, is considering plans to build a new generation of nuclear plants.

Because of concerns about global warming, Sweden has signaled that it will probably abandon a planned phase-out of its current reactors, which supply half the nation's electricity.

China has begun construction of a six-reactor plant, and it has announced plans to build as many as 30 nuclear plants within the next two decades.

Japan and South Korea also foresee a need for new nuclear-power plants.

Here in the United States, nuclear power accounts for over 70 percent of the nation's emission-free electricity generation. The carbon avoided by nuclear power is nearly equal to that produced by well over 100 million automobiles -- or nearly all the cars on the road, including light trucks.

Yet though the environmental benefits of nuclear power are impressive, none of this should give us too much comfort.

One of the world's leading climatologists, Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, said at the World Economic Forum that policymakers must face the possibility that abrupt climate change could begin within the next two decades. But we are already seeing the melting of glaciers in different parts of the world and the loss of sea ice in the Arctic.

Increased use of nuclear power can help us avoid an even more dangerous rise in greenhouse emissions. Through power "uprating" and other improvements at existing U.S. nuclear-power plants, utilities expect to provide an additional 10,000 megawatts by 2020: enough electricity to power 10 million homes.

New nuclear-power plants could supply another 50,000 megawatts over that period if the government were to provide the same tax incentive that has been available to windmills for the past several years.

A newly published report from the University of Chicago, sponsored by the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory, bears this out. It determined that a federal tax incentive would be essential to building the first four or five reactors, in order to overcome high capital costs and substantial first-of-a-kind engineering costs.

With those plants built successfully, the report says, the cost of subsequent reactors would fall substantially, making nuclear power competitive with plants that burn coal and natural gas. Nuclear power will reach that point sooner if fossil-fuel costs continue to rise.

It's not too late to make nuclear power a key source of energy. For the foreseeable future, we have no real alternative.

Daniel Berg is Institute Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. This column originally appeared in the Providence Journal and is distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.

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