Nuclear Power Costs More Energy Than It Saves!

(From www.itsgettinghotinhere.org 12/18/2007)


U.S. Going Nuke-ular?
Published by Alexander M. Tinker, December 18th, 2007 Dirty Energy , Economics , Efficiency , Focus the Nation , Government , Nuclear Power , Political Participation , Politics , Renewable Energy , United States
This Monday Congress agreed to guarantee loans for up to 80% of construction costs for new nuclear reactors. The legislation directs the Department of Energy to provide $20.5b for nuclear energy, $10b for renewables and $8b for “clean-coal” technology.
Numbers don’t lie. Only $10b of almost $40b in this bill is going towards the solution. What Congress is saying with this allocation is that renewables come in a distant second behind the already proven dangerous nuclear option.
What can be done to impress on Congress the need for real investment in real renewable energy? Focus the Nation teams have invited more than 140 members of the House and Senate to come to their campuses and discuss global warming solutions. That means about 400 of them still need to hear from you.
There’s another number of note here. Even if we generously assume that all the historical safety issues with nuclear reactors have been solved and that we can adequately secure them from terrorist attacks, nuclear power has a very low EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) ratio. Depending on whose numbers you use, nuclear plants may in fact take more energy to construct, maintain and deconstruct than they generate over their lifetimes, which is to say the EROEI is less than one.
Wind turbines have an EROEI between 18 and 25, and produce no emissions. Could it be any clearer?
Apparently it needs to be made a whole lot clearer to decision-makers in D.C. On Jan. 31, hundreds of local and state elected officials are already committed to engage with us on global warming solutions. It’s time to turn up the heat on Federal legislators and demand their attention.

(Note: Below are published responses to the above)


1. Alexander M. Tinker Dec 18th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
Some estimates of Nuclear power’s EROEI are quite high. I’ve seen numbers for Nuclear centrifuge enrichment of 43-59, and Nuclear diffusion enrichment of 10.5-24.
The problem with these numbers is they only account for the variable cost - the cost of producing/acquiring fuel, not the cost of constructing the reactor and decommissioning it. The construction of nuclear reactors requires a lot of cement and steel which are energy-intensive to produce. In addition, safely decommissioning these reactors requires a lot of energy, then of course the waste must be transported and stored forever.

1. Ken Dec 18th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Nuclear has never been cost effective - look at any literature claiming the contrary, and you’ll notice that they exclusively focus on *operating costs,” rather than full life-cycle costs which would include not only decommissioning, but also spent fuel and waste storage for the next 10-20K years.
Truth is, we wouldn’t have a tenth of the reactors (or the problems) we do now, without Price-Anderson subsidies for the past 40+ years.
Nuclear power is the most anti-democratic boondoggle ever invented.

1. Amy Ortiz Dec 21st, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Just because the IPCC has put nuclear on their list of solutions doesn’t mean that it IS a solution. Living in South Florida, I’ve watched coal plant proposals getting blocked, turned down and withdrawn. Once I got over my initial elation, it was to realize that these coal proposals were going to be replaced by nuclear. As a 20 year old activist, I will never support a world where when I am 40 we have doubled or tripled the amount of nuclear power plants in operation.It is a false solution, like so many others. I could go on and on about WHY nuclear is NOT a solution, but I would recommend the short film “Climate of Hope on Nuclear,” you can watch it on youtube in three partshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_NLdRUELjo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVyEibbnWUU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeCCBvz_XwA

NO NUKES, NO COAL, NO KIDDING