Unless we're planning on using magic to obtain the fuel, build the power stations, reprocess spent fuel, and decommission the power stations when they're done, that claim would appear to be false.
A nuclear-power plant feeding energy to a grid which powered electrified trains, cars and trucks would be zero emission.
Pretty funny- there are a number of mines where electric dump trucks actually produce energy on net! Anywhere you go down in elevation as you come out of the mine area, the extra weight as you're loaded can power the trip back up.
[1]: https://www.constructionjunkie.com/blog/2017/9/21/worlds-lar...
This is pretty wild, but makes perfect sense.
Maybe a fair comparison of lifetime emissions for each source would be appropriate?
All of these technologies are zero-on-site emissions, and that's a useful distinction of course (compared to coal). But of course we still need to consider the externalities of the rest of the process.
So far, we are trying to repurpose them, but its not a great solution. We can only use so many turbine blade park benches.
Personally, I think we will look back on wind power as a curious mistake, in comparison to solar farms and nuclear.
Very interesting. I didn't realize this - thanks for bringing it to my attention. Do you happen to have a link handy where I can learn more about these sorts of efforts?
The facts are quite simply that nuclear uses the least amount of materials and has the lowest overall resource consumption.
Uranium is mined threw one hole in the ground and is much cleaner and less destractive then virtually all other forms of mining. Furthermore you only need tiny amounts because the the energy density.
The mining required for solar and wind is larger by orders of magnitude.
The same goes for land use. Nuclear has a minuscule land use impact.
On carbon solar, wind and nuclear are all so much better that it hardly matters and calculations become way to specific about what was transported where and so on.
Nuclear pays for the decommissioning and for the waste. The 'waste' is all captures and does not harm anybody (not even animals). Compared to the waste form solar and wind that is not properly accounted for in most of the world.
So nuclear is overall has the smallest environmental impact.
TLDR: Wind onshore emits a pinch less than nuclear (11 vs 12 gCO2eq/kWh) but far from the 820 gCO2eq/kWh of Coal.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...
"The first conclusion is that the mean value of emissions over the course of the lifetime of a nuclear reactor (reported from qualified studies) is 66 g CO2e/kWh, due to reliance on existing fossil-fuel infrastructure for plant construction, decommissioning, and fuel processing along with the energy intensity of uranium mining and enrichment. Thus, nuclear energy is in no way ‘‘carbon free’’ or ‘‘emissions free,’’ even though it is much better (from purely a carbon-equivalent emissions standpoint) than coal, oil, and natural gas electricity generators"
http://www.grid.unep.ch/FP2011/step1/pdf/003_Sovacool_2008.p...
However, as long as a coal fired power plant is operating somewhere, you achieve a better result by using fossil fuels for the supply chain, feeding the electricity into the grid and saving more CO2 emissions elsewhere.
By the way, Sovacool's basic argument is that nuclear isn't CO2 free because the grid isn't nuclear enough. Something along the lines of "if we built more nuclear plants, we'd have to build more old enrichment plants and more coal plants to power them". In other words, he's too stupid or too crooked to correctly compute total derivatives.