30 Jun (NucNet): The COP21 United Nations climate change summit in Paris in December is a unique opportunity to internationally develop a low-carbon society in which nuclear power will have a key role to play, the European Nuclear Society’s Young Generation Network (YGN) said in a position paper.
YGN said the fight against climate change cannot discard, on ideological background and judgment, promising technologies such as nuclear energy, which has almost no carbon dioxide emissions and “one of the lowest production costs within the energy market”.
These costs stem mainly from investment costs, YGN said. Fuel and operating costs “have little impact on the price of nuclear electricity”.
Nuclear generation is predictable and provides baseload electricity with high reliability to the end-user, YGN said. “It is not subject to variations in fuel availability as uranium is largely available from diverse politically stable countries. Nuclear power is therefore a key asset for energy security and independence.”
YGN said a review of more than 20 studies assessing the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced by different forms of electricity generation shows that life cycle emissions from all of the major forms of renewable energy – solar, wind, biomass, hydroelectric –are similar to those produced by nuclear.
On the issue of waste management, YGN said around 370,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel had been produced worldwide by 2013, of which 25 percent was reprocessed.
Many countries are in the process of selecting their final waste disposal site. In Finland, the world’s first deep geological repository for high-level waste could be operational in the 2020s.
