Can Nuclear Power avert Climate Change? | Monde

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Can Nuclear Power avert Climate Change?

Écrit par Richard

Lundi, 22 Février 2010 17:42

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Nuclear power has been considered to be environmentally damaging, costly and dangerous, but with ever increasing energy demands and emissions from fossil fuels, is it time to revisit the nuclear option?

Bill Gates thinks so

At TED 2010, Bill Gates showed some of the energy analysis his foundation has been involved in. He makes a strong and sensible case that we need to reduce our emissions from energy generation to near zero in order to make a big reduction in the creation of climate change gases.

There are two phenomenon at work that are increasing our energy demand:

The increase in the energy consumed per person through our increase the use of "services" such as travel, education, appliances etc.
An increase in the global population and economic development across the globe.

These trends will require us to reduce our emissions per unit of energy generated otherwise as a planet we will be incapable of reducing our climate change gas emissions. To illustrate this, Bill Gates used repeatedly the formula in Figure 1 which shows that our only option to reduce climate change gas emissions is to do so on an energy generation level. P is population, S services used, E energy use per service and C is CO2 per energy generated.
How to reduce climate change gases

Figure 1: The Energy Use, Generation and Climate Change Relation.

Therefore we need to quickly move to energy generation that doesn't emit CO2. That leaves really, solar, wind and nuclear along with carbon capture and storage.

Each of these generating methods are difficult to implement on a large enough scale to make a big enough impact. Of these, the most promising is actually nuclear.

Using advanced technologies, it's possible to create safe and efficient nuclear plants. The costs are better understood for existing technologies and there is work underway to create new generation methods that can consume a lot of the existing nuclear waste.

Can we leave nuclear waste to our children's children to clean-up? How big is the security risk? Is it Zen to create new nuclear power stations? These are all big questions and as a society we need to ask them and answer them quickly. With our collective brain-power, a solution to store waste must be found before more power stations are created, even those that are high efficient as Bill Gates proposes.

One very important aspect of nuclear waste to consider though, is that it can be captured and managed more readily than that from fossil fuels. Nuclear has no gaseous emissions, it's waste is solid and liquid, thus is more straightforward to capture and much less prone to be released into the environment.

So as a technology that can power our growing populations and its need for services in a clean, affordable and safe way, nuclear is looking all the more interesting for our futures.

For more information, check out Bill's talk at TED 2010:

What do you think? Is nuclear an option for you? Do you think waste can be managed safely? Are there alternatives? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pjgardner/467128837, TED.com, http://www.flickr.com/photos/senoranderson/259110332/