How Green is Nuclear Energy?

Uranium (Nuclear Minerals) / Related Environmental Issues

Date posted: 05/01/17

Gail H Marcus recently assessed the nuclear power industry environmental credentials in comparison to fossil fuels and renewable energy sources. The environment is a shared resource, and in recent years the question of how to moderate the impacts of human activity on the air, water and land has become increasingly important. One of the characteristics that has received the most attention in this effort is the greenness of our energy supply. Yet the term green seems not to be well understood and it is not consistently applied. Some sources define a green energy source as one with a low environmental impact, but that merely shifts the question towards defining impact. There is currently a lot of focus on greenhouse gases (GHGs), and many definitions seem to view low impact and Low-GHG emissions as synonymous. Alternative definitions, however, include other types of environmental effects, such as particulate air pollution, use of water or the generation of waste products. This confusion and multiplicity of definitions has particular implications for considering what the term green might mean for the nuclear-energy industry. Nuclear power is sometimes characterized as producing no GHGs, and while this is not completely true, it is certainly accurate to say that GHG emissions from nuclear power generation are much lower than those of fossil-fuel-based power sources. Another characteristic of interest is the sustainability of different energy sources, that is, whether the supply could be used up over time. Simplistically, it would appear that both fossil fuels and uranium for nuclear power, being mined from the ground, are finite and will eventually be used up, while renewable resources such as wind and sunlight are effectively infinite. However, this viewpoint ignores the fact that the systems required to extract energy from sunlight and wind use mined materials as well. Read on. Note that nuclear incidents except Chernobyl have killed or irradiated zero persons.