Fact check: Is nuclear energy good for the climate? | Hacker News Reader

Fact check: Is nuclear energy good for the climate?

dw.com

4 pointsmiduil6 comments

> According to new but still unpublished data from the state-run German Environment Agency (UBA) as well as the WISE figures, nuclear power releases 3.5 times more CO2 per kilowatt-hour than photovoltaic solar panel systems. Compared with onshore wind power, that figure jumps to 13 times more CO2.

It would be nice to have that data published, and verified by a source that isn't funded by the German government, but I suppose the UBA numbers are reasonably credible if they match those of WISE, the Netherlands-based World Information Service on Energy.

Just searched for it a bit and still couldn't find it. One thing I could find is something by Swiss government which appears to consider plenty of factors, though I can't find any numbers that would show their results of kw/co2 equivalents.

I wonder if there is anything recent and good provided by the iaea.

https://www.psi.ch/sites/default/files/2019-05/PSI_LCA-Nucle...

These unpublished German numbers seem way off, you usually measure CO2eq and not CO2 maybe that explains it? CO2eq takes "all" greenhouse gas polution into account. It's not Germany, but here is some data for nuclear energy from Vattenfall (the operator) in Sweden. [0] The LCA assessment is done according to the ISO 14025 standard. It's about 3g CO2eq per kWh. From the PDF: "The whole lifecycle of nuclear power has been inventoried hence the full path from mining of natural uranium through production of uranium fuel and generation of electricity at the nuclear power plant to final repository of the spent fuel is included " [0] https://www.environdec.com/library/epd923

On second thought gCO2/kWh instead of gCO2eq/kWh can't be the explanation since gCO2eq=gCO2+the other gases equivalent.

>"The whole lifecycle of nuclear power has been inventoried...

But if they didn't do the same for solar panels (materials mining, manufacture, manufacturing infrastructure, transportation and installation, decommissioning, etc.), it's a horrendously biased concept.

Also, determining a lifecycle of a nuclear plant is a crapshoot. Modern designs that can be replicated at scale will have much more production per unit of deployment cost than the one-off botch designs like those implemented in California by PGE and SMUD.

Their CO2eq are all calculated according to the same ISO standard, but they don't have solar so the numbers only exist for hydro, wind and nuclear.

Conspicuously absent is a comparison with fossil fuel power, which is 15-30x more CO2 per kWh than nuclear (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11).

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