Nuclear power increases global warming

[Fast Walker 52]

http://commondreams.org/views/2016/09/23/how-nuclear-power-causes-global-warming

[Turbineguy]

1. Nuclear power has a lower thermal efficiency than conventional thermal.

The steam temperatures are lower.

But there is no such thing as superheated water.

[Eatbeef]

2. Suggestion

I guess the only way to make a difference and avoid contributing to global warming is to go off the grid. All electricity production contributes in one way or another, you think wind farms grow themselves? Goodbye electricity! Hello wash board and horse n buggy! Are you off the grid? Wait, no, you're online.....

[Bearware]

4. There are some fundamental flaws in the article.

Carbon (whether C-12 or C-14) is not a greenhouse gas as such. The molecule CO2 is currently the most important green house gas (although methane (CH4) is hot on it's heels) but it doesn't matter whether the carbon is C-12 or C-14 that forms the CO2. Outside of accidents, nuclear reactors do not emit C-14. Coal plants do emit C-14 (and radon) but it is the CO2 that matters for climate change.

Nuclear reactors do emit heat to the atmosphere, just as coal or gas plants do. For that matter so do solar or wind for the same amount of energy generated. The primary cause of climate change is more and more of the energy from the sun is trapped in the atmosphere by increasing amounts of greenhouse gases before the energy can be radiated back out to space.

The article is rather dated (2016). After freezing most major research and development of advance reactor designs for roughly 50+ years, there are a number of new Gen IV reactor designs that will refute almost all of the remaining arguments in the article. A number of newer molten salt reactor designs cannot melt down, can shutdown automatically without human input in emergency, do not need cooling towers, do not need to be built near bodies of water and fast reactor versions can burn most "high level nuclear waste" directly as fuel leaving only a few percent of it as waste that will decay away in a few hundred rather than tens of thousands of years. No mining of additional fuel is likely to be needed for many decades if not hundreds of years. Eventually they may even get around to burning up the high level waste in Yucca mountain and if they can get pure enough samples of "corium" (the high level radioactive remnants of a meltdown) from Kashmir. Every other method I have heard about cleaning up radioactive waste involves burying/storing it somewhere.

We need all out research on many fronts without arguing over the problems of obsolete designs whether nuclear, fusion, solar, wind etc. If we could use coal or gas without emitting CO2 or CH4 that might be worth doing if it is economical enough but I suspect it will never be.

[honest.abe]

5. Heat generated by nuclear power plants should be considered a factor in adding to global warming.

It may be small compared to the benefits of zero C02 emissions but it still needs to be considered.