![]() | The word is slowly spreading that we have have a problem | The Oil Drum | A gentle cough in the direction of the NYT | ![]() |
26 comments on More on the long term UK situation
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
26 comments on More on the long term UK situation
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
Google search
Advanced search
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
- Politics and Peak Energy
- How do we maintain adequate phosphorus and potassium levels for crops?
- What should we do with funds set aside for retirement?
TOD:Europe
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- Electric Vehicles: The End Of Australian Manufacturing ?
- Upcoming Forum In Sydney: 'Peak Oil - Is this the end of civilisation as we know it ?'
- From Counterculture To Cyberculture: The Life And Times Of Stewart Brand
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- Early Warning
- The Energy Blog
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.”
—Upton Sinclair
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Dave Murphy, Engineer-Poet, Glenn, Heading Out, Jason Bradford, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Nate Hagens, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:ANZ: aeldric, Big Gav, Phil Hart
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.










GAIA Host Collective
"electricity generated by nuclear power stations, which produce no carbon emissions"
Strictly speaking it is true that nuclear fission does not involve carbon emissions. However, the entire process of mining and processing uranium, manufacturing the materials needed to build a reactor, supporting a reactor all consume large amounts of fossil fuel. As yet we have little information about the fossil fuel required to decommission a reactor.
An analysis has been done showing that in the case of hard rock ores containing low levels of uranium more energy is consumed in processing the ore and enriching the uranium than is produced in the reactor.
Obviously not all reactors are run this way but the point is that it is wrong to assert that nuclear reactors produce zero carbon emissions.
I can google up nuclear industry papers assuring that the volumes are small compared with the energy output from the plant. But they are of course not independent papers. They give figures like 1.35% lifecycle energy input of the electrical output for the Forsmark nuclear plant in Sweden. Other statements are 1,7% up to 2.9% with poor ores. If all that energy is oil and it is 3% we get one unit of oil energy giving 33 units of electricity.
> As yet we have little information about the fossil fuel required to decommission a reactor.
I have a hard time imagining any reasonable way for a decomissioning to need large ammounts of fossil fuels. Most of the volume of materials are not radioactive and can be recycled. The rest needs concrete etc for the burial. It ought to be significantly less then for building the powerplant.
> An analysis has been done showing that in the case of hard rock ores containing low levels of uranium more energy is consumed in processing the ore and enriching the uranium than is produced in the reactor.
This ought to mean that someone is giving energy (oil) for free to the nuclear fuel industry. If the energy input for making the fuel is as large as the energy output from the fuel it would give an enourmous price increase for the uranium fuel.
Was it a calculation for the EROI where the rock isent an ore any more?
> Obviously not all reactors are run this way but the point is that it is wrong to assert that nuclear reactors produce zero carbon emissions.
It is wrong for simpler reasons. Much of the mining machines and all of the transportation infrastructure is run on fossil fuels. It is worse for some of the nuclear fuel wich for historical reasons use old inefficient gas diffusion plants run by large ammounts of coal generated electricity. I do not know why those plants have not been replaced by gas centrifuges 10 years ago or more.
When demand increases to the point that new enrichment plants must be built, they'll be gas centrifuges. Even the GD plants aren't that bad; look up the number of SWU to fuel a reactor and the kWh/SWU, and you'll see the enrichment burden is a single-digit percentage of plant output.
Nuclear Power: the Energy Balance
Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith
http://www.oprit.rug.nl/deenen/
I can't speak for the accuracy of this work but it is thought provoking. They calculate from published sources the energy required to build, operate, supply fuel for and dismantle a reactor. They also calculate the CO2 generated by all of these processes.
The short of it is that the authors would agree with some of the above statements. Relatively rich ore in soft sandstone can easily produce a healthy energy yield and fewer CO2 emissions than a gas fired plant. The issue is as poorer ores from harder rocks are used at what point does the net energy yield fall to zero.