CO2 emission of electricity from nuclear power stations

How much CO₂ is produced by atomic energy?

One of the few pros of nuclear power is the relatively low emission of carbon dioxide (CO₂), one of the major causes of global warming. For this reason, nuclear power has been proposed as "the" method to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Some of the nuclear lobbyists even claim that the production of electricity by atomic energy does not emit any CO₂. But this is nonsense. Whenever a plant is built to produce electricity, CO₂ is emitted. So even the production of electricity by renewable resources like solar power, water, wind, or biomass does release some CO₂.

To calculate the amount of CO₂ being released, the whole life cycle of a plant as well as the production of the raw energy has to be looked at. For a nuclear power plant, this includes construction, operation, maintenance and refurbishments, decommissioning and dismantling of the reactor. Of the same importance is the nuclear fuel: Recovery of uranium from the earth’s crust, extraction of uranium from ores, enrichment and chemical treatment, transportation as well as disposing of used fuel.

A life cycle analyses (LCA) carried out by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith came to the following result:

Electricity from atomic energy emits 90 to 140 g CO₂ per kWh of electricity produced.

The relatively high range of uncertainty is due to the different grade of ores used. It depends on how rich the ores are that are used to obtain the Uranium. For poor ores, the higher value does apply and for rich ores, the lower value does apply.

This leads to an interesting issue: The world-wide reserves for Uranium are a very limited resource. It is estimated to last for about 50 to 70 years with the current demand. If additional nuclear reactors are built, the supply will last correspondingly shorter.

The higher the demand for Uranium, the more and more poor ores will have to be processed. This however will lead to a CO₂ balance for atomic power, which gets worse and worse over time. Storm and Smith in the above mentioned life cycle analysis came to the conclusion, that between the years 2050 (if additional nuclear power stations are built) and 2075 (no additional nuclear reactors) the CO₂ emissions of electricity from atomic energy will be higher as the same electricity produced by a gas burning plant! So nuclear energy can definitely not be the solution to mitigate the effects of global warming!

Let’s compare the CO₂ emissions to produce 1 kWh of electricity by different technologies: