World Generators Go for Nuclear Power to Save World
Date: 21-Jun-07
Country: UK
Author: Jeremy Lovell
The World Energy Council (WEC) said nuclear electricity was not a panacea, and had to go hand in hand with other low carbon technologies, but it would be crucial to the energy mix.
The WEC said renewables like wind, waves, solar and hydro had a role to play but would in most cases not be deployed quickly enough to decarbonise electricity production which accounts for 41 percent of world carbon dioxide emissions.
"If we are going to get through this century we had better assure ourselves that nuclear power is available for our coming generations," said Kurt Yeager, lead author of the WEC's "Energy and Climate Change" report to be released on Thursday.
The report says climate policies globally have proved inadequate to meet the challenge of global warming and governments need to be far sighted and bold.
"The problem will not go away magically in 2050. We will be at a low carbon economy at that time but to sustain that we need to build nuclear," Yeager told Reuters.
Proponents say nuclear power emits little of the carbon dioxide that scientists say is the major cause of global warming from burning fossil fuels for power and transport.
It supplies 18 percent of the world's electricity. There are 437 working reactors, with 30 more under construction, 74 planned and 162 proposed.
CARBON CAPTURE
The WEC said coal would continue to be a major source of electricity because it was cheap and in plentiful supply. It urged nations to rapidly develop coal refining capacity and carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies.
China, vying with the United States for the title of the world's worst carbon pulluter, is now building an average of two coal-fired power stations a week to feed its booming economy, a Dutch report said this week. India is not far behind.
But Yeager cautioned against the widespread belief that CCS in which carbon is captured, liquefied and buried before it hits the atmosphere was a "silver bullet" solution to global warming.
"The economics are huge. We are talking about capturing and moving a quantity of liquefied gas, the volume of which is equivalent to all of the oil and gas movement in the world today, and we have no infrastructure for it," he said.
"Then we have to ensure that the geological formations for storage will pass the test of environmental and public acceptance -- and that is far from a given," he said, noting that this put it in much the same category as nuclear waste.
If liquefied carbon dioxide stored deep underground was liberated by accident or design it would poison the local air and escape into the atmosphere to undo the good its original capture had done.
WEC proposed a three-phase strategy to tackle the problem starting with a global agreement by 2015 to cut emissions.
This would be followed by actions up to 2030 to stabilise them and then to bring them down to current levels by 2050.
Yeager accepted that this was a far from urgent solution to the crisis and was setting a far easier benchmark than that set out in the Kyoto Protocol which uses 1990 as its base year.
"This is a pragmatic and realistic approach," he said, adding that the WEC plan envisaged a cost of two percent of gross domestic product over the next half century but a payback of at least 10 times that. "This is enlightened self interest."
WEC general secretary Gerald Doucet called for a price of US$25-$30 per tonne of CO2 to help generate the US$800 billion a year of investments necessary, and suggested a World Trade Organisation-type body to achieve and police it.