cllimatechange

Nuclear Power and Climate Change

A favourite trick of the nuclear industry and its fellow travellers is to argue that nuclear power is the answer to climate change. But it just ain't so! Is making that argument opportunistic in exploiting the public's genuine and growing concerns about climate change and global warming, or is it simply misinformed?

In either case, it simply isn't scienticially valid, or even logical. A few reasons why:

climate change has many different causes; only one of the sources is from fossil fuel used to generate electricity
using nuclear reactors to generate electricity doesn't avoid the use of fossil fuels, it simply spreads the use out along the nuclear chain; fossil fuels are used in uranium mining and refining and at every step in the production and transportation of nuclear fuel bundles, from uranium ore to yellowcake to the fuel bundles themselves
the nuclear power generating stations in Ontario have been incredibly unreliable; if the electricity system is designed to rely in any significant part on an unreliable source (such as nuclear power) then each time the reactors are down the electricity has to come from somewhere else; in Ontario, for many years the coal generators have worked overtime to make up for the base load electricity that was lost when the reactors had to be shut down for repairs or were run at reduced capacity