How green is nuclear power?

Some call it a carbon-free alternative to fossil fuels, but others point to significant environmental costs.

from the March 7, 2007 edition

Page 3 of 3

Greener alternatives can't meet needs

"The bottom line is that society needs to figure out how to get the energy it needs at the lowest possible social and environmental costs," he says. "Any reasonable researcher would recognize that renewable energy has a significant and increasing role to play. But by 2050, these will not supply even a small percentage of the worldwide electricity need. You have to get real about what is needed – massive amounts of energy on a massive scale."

Key question: coal displacement

But for those energy experts who have done life-cycle analysis of nuclear power, the big concern is that policymakers may be misled into believing that just because nuclear CO2 emissions are low, the cost of nuclear as an option to address climate change would be a bargain. Better, they say, to take the huge amounts of money needed for nuclear plants and use it to build lower-cost solutions that will displace more coal.

"It's easy to show that building more reactors makes climate change worse than it should have been," says Amory Lovins, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank in Snowmass, Colo. "That's because a dollar put into new reactors gives two to 10 times less climate solution for the amount of coal-power displaced than if you had bought cheaper solutions with the same dollars."

Environmental groups, too, are well aware of the conundrum surrounding the claim of carbon-free energy. Most of them maintain that nuclear is not the answer to climate change.

But their antinuclear arguments have centered on environmental damage from nuclear waste, potential accidents, and terror threats.

"First, nuclear was supposed to be too cheap to meter; now, they're framing it as a solution to climate change," says Erich Pica, director of economic policy for Friends of the Earth, an environmental group. "We hope this Democratic Congress will be skeptical of that claim."

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