30th November 2005

The Citizen repeats the nuclear industry's misleading claim that it is "free of emissions" of greenhouse gases (29th November 2005).

It is true that reactors don't emit carbon dioxide, but you need to look at the whole nuclear fuel cycle to assess its contribution to greenhouse gases, and in this it is responsible for large emissions. These take place throughout the whole process, from the mining of the uranium and milling of the ore needed for producing the power to the final transport and depositing of the waste.

The Government recently admitted that it has not made any comparison of its contribution to greenhouse gases throughout the whole fuel cycle. German experts estimate nuclear's whole production cycle is responsible for 4 or 5 times more greenhouse gases than renewables (i).

Even if nuclear was carbon neutral, which it isn't, it would still not be the way ahead. While we need to do all we can to tackle climate change, radioactive waste also poses a deadly long-term threat, and we have a moral duty to minimise the effects of both, not to choose between them. Nuclear power creates enormous problems: waste we don't know what to do with, radioactive emissions and the unavoidable risk of accident and terrorist attack.

Greens want a safe energy mix of renewable energy sources, cleaned up fossil fuels and energy efficiency measures – all of which are safe, effective and proven technologies- are available now. And it is not an impractical fantasy: Germany, a massively industrial power, is closing its nuclear power station and moving towards reliance on a non nuclear mix.

Ivi Szaboova-Baxendale, Stroud District Green party

Notes:

(i)  David Lowry, who is nuclear issues coordinator for SERA writes in the Guardian:

"A number of studies have examined CO2 emissions - commonly expressed as CO2 equivalents per kWh - for different methods of producing electricity. The most comprehensive model has been created by the Oko Institute, which advises the German environment ministry, and by Professors Smith and van Leeuwen at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Both studies conclude that the nuclear fuel cycle can emit relatively large amounts of CO2. The lower the uranium concentration in ore, the more CO2 generated; and as a means of enrichment, gas diffusion was much more energy intensive - and thus CO2 emitting - than centrifuge separation.

Using sensible assumptions, Professors Smith and Van Leeuden determined that nuclear generation produced about a third as much CO2 per kWh as conventional mid-sized gas-fired electricity generation.

As several papers made clear when presented to the World Nuclear Association's annual symposium last month, the industry will increasingly have to rely on poorer quality uranium ores, and thus CO2 emissions from the nuclear cycle will increase. Oko's analysis shows that nuclear CO2 emissions are up to 4 or 5 times greater than those from renewables.

Last week, the energy minister Malcolm Wicks conceded in a written answer to Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat environmental spokesman, that the Department for Trade and Industry 'has undertaken no assessment of the life-cycle carbon emissions of a nuclear fission plant'."