New Nuclear
There’s a growing push for nuclear-power generation as a choice for countries trying to wean themselves off fossil fuels and reduce their carbon footprint. But new research suggests there are potential downsides. For many scientists — and Bill Gates — nuclear energy is part of the answer to the world’s climate-change problem. The market for nuclear power could triple by 2050 across the world, according to a recent study by Third Way, a U.S.-based think tank. There are more than 60 advanced reactor designs in development in the U.S., the Atlantic Council, a U.S. think tank, said in a paper. However, a recent study published in Nature Energy provides a different view. Scientists who conducted the study collected data from 123 countries over a 25-year period, examining how the introduction of either nuclear-power or renewable-energy sources affects each country’s levels of carbon emissions. The results show that a larger-scale national investment in nuclear-power plants not only fails to yield a significant reduction in carbon emissions, it actually causes higher emissions in poorer countries that implemented this strategy. For renewables, the opposite is true — in certain large country samples, the relationship between renewable energy and reduction in CO2-emissions is up to seven times stronger than the corresponding relationship for nuclear power. It is interesting how consistent the results are across different time frames and country sets.
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