User:Rwbest/Kladblok

Opinions on nuclear energy

See also: Life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of energy sources

See also: Life-cycle greenhouse-gas emissions of energy sources and renewable energy debate

Jacobson argues that if the United States wants to reduce global warming, air pollution and energy instability, it should invest only in the best energy options, and that nuclear power is not one of them. To support his claim, Jacobson provided an analysis in 2009 that intended to inform policy makers on which energy sources are best for solving the air pollution, climate, and energy security problems the world faces. He updated this analysis in his 2020 textbook.

That analysis accounted for some emission sources not included in previous analyses, The primary emissions due to nuclear energy are called “opportunity-cost emissions.” These are the emissions due to the long time lag between planning and operation of a nuclear plant (10 to 19 years) versus a wind or solar farm (2 to 5 years), for example. Of the total estimated emissions from nuclear in the 2009 study (68–180.1 g/kWh), 59–106 g/kWh was due to opportunity-cost emissions. Most of the rest (9-70 g/kWh) was due to lifecycle emissions, and a small amount (0-4.1 g/kWh) was due to the risk of carbon emissions associated with the burning of cities resulting from a nuclear war aided by the expansion of nuclear energy to countries previously without them, and the subsequent development of weapons in those countries. Jacobson raised this last assumption during a Ted talk Does the world need nuclear energy? in 2010, with Jacobson heading the debate in the negative.

Like his PhD advisor Richard P. Turco, who notably coined the phrase "nuclear winter", Jacobson has taken a similar approach to calculating the hypothetical effects of nuclear wars on the climate but has further extended this into providing an analysis that intends to inform policy makers on which energy sources to support, as of 2009. Jacobson's analyses suggest that "nuclear power results in up to 25 times more carbon emissions per unit energy than wind energy".

This analysis is controversial. Jacobson arrived at this conclusion of "25 times more carbon emissions than wind, per unit of energy generated" (68–180.1 g/kWh), by specifically expanding on some concepts that are highly contested. These include, though are not limited to, the suggestion that emissions associated with civil nuclear energy should, in the upper limit, include the risk of carbon emissions associated with the burning of cities resulting from a nuclear war aided by the expansion of nuclear energy and weapons to countries previously without them. An assumption that Jacobson's debating opponent similarly raised, during the Ted talk Does the world need nuclear energy? in 2010, with Jacobson heading the debate in the negative. Jacobson assumes, at the high end (180.1 g/kWh), that 4.1 g/kWh are due to some form of nuclear induced burning that will occur once every 30 years. At the low end, 0 g/kWh are due to nuclear induced burning. Responding to a commentary on his work in the Journal Environmental Science and Technology in 2013, James Hansen has characterized Jacobson's analysis on this topic of greenhouse gas emissions, as "lack(ing) credibility" and similarly regards Jacobson's other viewpoint of extra "opportunity-cost" emissions as "dubious". With the foundation of Hansen's incredulity being based on French experience, that decarbonized ~80% of the grid in 15 years, completed 56 reactors in the 15-year period, thus raising the fact that depending on the existence of established regulator certainty & political conditions, nuclear energy facilities have been accelerated through the licensing/planning phase and have therefore rapidly decarbonizated electric grids.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported a range of total-life-cycle nuclear power emissions as between 4-110 g/kWh[54]  Jacobson's lifecycle emission figures of 9-70 g/kWh fall within this IPCC range. The IPCC however, did not account for "opportunity cost" emissions. The IPCC did not provide any explanation for not including such emissions. Although nuclear advocates have balked at the idea of including even a small risk of emissions, even at the high end, from a potential nuclear war arising from the spread of nuclear energy, the IPCC has stated that,

"Barriers to and risks associated with an increasing use of nuclear energy include operational risks and the associated safety concerns, uranium mining risks, financial and regulatory risks, unresolved waste management issues, nuclear weapons proliferation concerns, and adverse public opinion.”

In 2012, Jacobson coauthored a paper estimating the health effects of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The paper projected approximately 180 "cancer-related morbidities" to eventually occur in the public. Health physicist Kathryn Higley of Oregon State University wrote in 2012, "The methods of the study were solid, and the estimates were reasonable, although there is still uncertainty around them. But given how much cancer already exists in the world, it would be very difficult to prove that anyone’s cancer was caused by the incident at Fukushima Daiichi." Burton Richter, tenured in Stanford with Jacobson, who analyzed the use of the disputed Linear no-Threshold (LNT) model in the paper, similarly stated in his critique, "It is a first rate job and uses sources of radioactivity measurements that have not been used before to get a very good picture of the geographic distribution of radiation, a very good idea". Richter also noted that "I also think there is too much editorializing about accident potential at Diablo Canyon which makes [Jacobson's] paper sound a bit like an anti-nuclear piece instead of the very good analysis that it is," and "It seems clear that considering only the electricity generated by the Fukushima plant, nuclear is much less damaging to health than coal and somewhat better that [sic] gas even after including the accident. If nuclear power had never been deployed in Japan the effects on the public would have [been] much worse."