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SUSTAINABILITY

How Nuclear Power Can

Stop Global Warming
Nuclear power is one of the few technologies that can quickly
combat climate change, experts argue
By David Biello on December 12, 2013

111

 Southern Company

When the Atlantic Navigator docked in Baltimore harbor earlier this month, the
freighter carried the last remnants of some of the nuclear weapons that the Soviet
Union had brandished in the cold war. During the past 20 years more than 19,000
Russian warheads have been dismantled and processed to make fuel for U.S. nuclear
reactors. In fact, during that period more than half the uranium fuel that powered the
more than 100 reactors in the U.S. came from such reprocessed nuclear weapons.
In addition to reducing the risk of nuclear war, U.S. reactors have also been staving off
another global challenge: climate change. The low-carbon electricity produced by such
reactors provides 20 percent of the nation's power and, by the estimates of climate
scientist James Hansen of Columbia University, avoided 64 billion metric tons of
greenhouse gas pollution. They also avoided spewing soot and other air pollution like
coal-fired power plants do and thus have saved some 1.8 million lives.

And that's why Hansen, among others, such as former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu,
thinks that nuclear power is a key energy technology to fend off catastrophic climate
change. "We can't burn all these fossil fuels," Hansen told a group of reporters on
December 3, noting that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy source they will
continue to be burned. "Coal is almost half the [global] emissions. If you replace these
power plants with modern, safe nuclear reactors you could do a lot of [pollution
reduction] quickly."
Indeed, he has evidence: the speediest drop in greenhouse gas pollution on record
occurred in France in the 1970s and 80s, when that country transitioned from burning
fossil fuels to nuclear fission for electricity, lowering its greenhouse emissions by
roughly 2 percent per year. The world needs to drop its global warming pollution by 6
percent annually to avoid "dangerous" climate change in the estimation of Hansen and
his co-authors in a recent paper in PLoS One. "On a global scale, it's hard to see how we
could conceivably accomplish this without nuclear," added economist and co-author
Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, where Hansen
works.
The only problem: the world is not building so many nuclear reactors.
Nuclear future
China leads the world in new nuclear reactors, with 29 currently under construction and
another 59 proposed, according to the World Nuclear Association. And China has not
confined itself solely to the typical reactors that employ water and uranium fuel rods; it
has built everything from heavy-water reactors originally designed in Canada to a small
test fast-reactor.
Yet, even if every planned reactor in China was to be built, the country would still rely
on burning coal for more than 50 percent of its electric powerand the Chinese nuclear
reactors would provide at best roughly the same amount of energy to the developing
nation as does the existing U.S. fleet. Plus, nuclear requires emissions of greenhouse
gases for construction, including steel and cement as well as the enrichment of uranium

ore required to make nuclear fuel (or the downblending of uranium from nuclear
weapons as in the case of the "Megatons to Megawatts" program). Over the full lifetime
of a nuclear power plant, that means greenhouse gas emissions of roughly 12 grams of
CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced, the same as wind turbines
(which also require steel, plastics, rare earths and the like in their construction) and less
than photovoltaic panels, according to the U.S. Department of Energys National
Renewable Energy Laboratory.
In other parts of the world nuclear has begun to dwindle. Japan may never restart its
nuclear plants in the wake of the multiple meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi following
the earthquake and tsunami in 2011, which also soured public opinion in many parts of
the world. Germany still plans to eliminate nuclear power and even France has
announced plans to reduce its reliance on reactors. In the U.S. the five new nuclear
reactors under construction will replace the four aging reactors that closed in 2013, but
as older reactors like Oyster Creek in New Jersey and Vermont Yankee continue to shut
down, the number of reactors in the U.S. may be doomed to dwindle as well.
A big problem is cost. The construction of large nuclear power plants requires a lot of
money to ensure safety and reliability. For example, for the U.S. to derive one quarter of
its total energy supply from nuclear would require building roughly 1,000 new reactors
(both to replace old ones and expand the fleet). At today's prices for the two AP-1000
reactors being built in Georgia, such an investment would cost $7 trillion, although that
total bill might shrink with an order of that magnitude.
One other idea to cut cost is to begin building smaller reactors of so-called modular
design. The Tennessee Valley Authority hopes to catalyze development of such reactors
by installing one at its Clinch River site in Tennessee, former home of the U.S.s failed
attempt to build its own commercial fast reactor.
That never-completed breeder reactor is part of a legacy of failed U.S. research and
development of new types of reactors, such as the Experimental Breeder Reactor that
ran successfully in Idaho for nearly 30 years. "It's a shame that the U.S. essentially

stopped R&D on advanced nuclear power a few decades ago," Hansen noted. "By now
we should be in a position where a country like China would have some options other
than coal."
New dawn?
That said, nuclear reactors are beginning to get the kind of scientific attention not seen
since at least the end of the cold war. Novel designs with alternative cooling fluids other
than water, such as Transatomic Power's molten saltcooled reactor or the liquid lead
bismuth design from Hyperion Power, are in development. Alternative concepts have
attracted funding from billionaires like Bill Gates. Transatomic Power even won the top
prize from energy investors at the 2013 summit of the Advanced Research Projects
AgencyEnergy, or ARPAE, in 2013. "The intellectual power of what's been done in
the nuclear space should allow for radical designs that meet tough requirements," Gates
told ARPAE's 2012 summit, noting that the modeling power of today's
supercomputers should allow even more innovation. "When you have fission, you have
a million times more energy than when you burn hydrocarbons. That's a nice advantage
to have."
ARPAE itself, however, has no program to develop alternative reactors because of the
expense of proving out novel designs and the long timescales required to develop any of
them. "We searched a lot in nuclear," ARPAE's former director Arun Majumdar, now
at Google, said in a interview with Scientific American earlier this year. "We realized
that in the nuclear business, investing $30 [million] to $40 million, I'm not sure it
would have moved the needle. That is something that I wish I had had the budget to
try."
With more money for development of novel designs and public financial support for
constructionperhaps as part of a clean energy portfolio standard that lumps in all lowcarbon energy sources, not just renewables or a carbon taxnuclear could be one of the
pillars of a three-pronged approach to cutting greenhouse gas emissions: using less
energy to do more (or energy efficiency), low-carbon power, and electric cars (as long as
they are charged with electricity from clean sources, not coal burning). "The options for

large-scale clean electricity are few in number," Sachs noted, including geothermal,
hydropower, nuclear, solar and wind. "Each part of the world will have different choices
about how to get on a trajectory with most of the energy coming from that list rather
than coal."
As long as countries like China or the U.S. employ big grids to deliver electricity, there
will be a need for generation from nuclear, coal or gas, the kinds of electricity
generation that can be available at all times. A rush to phase out nuclear power
privileges natural gasas is planned under Germany's innovative effort, dubbed the
Energiewende (energy transition), to increase solar, wind and other renewable power
while also eliminating the country's 17 reactors. In fact, Germany hopes to develop
technology to store excess electricity from renewable resources as gas to be burned
later, a scheme known as power to gas, according to economist and former German
politician Rainer Baake, now director of an energy transition think tank Agora
Energiewende. Even worse, a nuclear stall can lead to the construction of more coalfired power plants, as happened in the U.S. after the end of the nuclear power plant
construction era in the 1980s.
Hansen, for one, argues that abundant, clean energy is necessary to lift people out of
poverty and begin to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from a swelling human
population. Nuclear is one of the technologies available todayand with room for
significant improvement and innovation. In that sense, natural gas is a bridge fuel to
disaster, even with some form of CO2 capture and storage, and the world must
immediately transition to renewables and nuclear.
But significant hurdles remain, not least the decades required for design, licensing and
construction of even existing nuclear technologies, let alone novel ideas. That may mean
advanced nuclear power cannot contribute much to efforts to combat climate change in
the near term, which leaves current reactor technology as the only short-term nuclear
optionand one that is infrequently employed at the global scale at present.

In the same way, U.S. nuclear power plants have not eliminated the threat of nuclear
weapons despite 20 years of megatons to megawatts. Russia retains an estimated 8,500
nuclear warheadsand the U.S. some 7,700despite the best efforts to fission the
problem away. The problem of fission and climate change is equally stuck at present.
But, as Hansen wrote in an additional assessment of his new analysis,
"Environmentalists need to recognize that attempts to force all-renewable policies on all
of the world will only assure that fossil fuels continue to reign for base-load electric
power, making it unlikely that abundant affordable power will exist and implausible
that fossil fuels will be phased out."
Rights & Permissions

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

David Biello
Biello is the award-winning senior reporter for environment and energy at
Scientific American. He has also written on subjects ranging from
astronomy to zoology for both the Web site and magazine. He has been
reporting on the environment and energy since 1999--long enough to be
cynical but not long enough to be depressed. He is a contributor to the
Instant Egghead video series, 60-Second Science podcasts, and host of
"Beyond the Light Switch" as well as a forthcoming documentary on ethanol
for PBS. He is the author of a children's book on bullet trains and is
currently working on a book for grown-ups about whether the Earth has
entered a new geologic epoch thanks to people's impacts and what should
be done about this Anthropocene.

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