A number of voices online have been watching the Copenhagen conference and are bringing up the role of nuclear. We’ve rounded up a few to highlight, let us know as you see more by adding comments here, and we’ll highlight those as well.

• Michael Avari looks at the Copenhagen convention and sees a direct connection to nuclear power in a post to his blog yesterday:

  …The solution is simple and within our reach, but evidently beyond the vision of governments.  In his testimony, Cristy further stated, “And, if the Congress deems it necessary to reduce CO2 emissions, the single most effective way to do so by a small, but at least detectable, amount is through the massive implementation of a nuclear power program.  Other currently available alternatives simply cannot produce enough energy to be significantly noticed at a price and geographic scale that is affordable.”

  Nuclear power produces no CO2.  Yet, the United States produces only 19% of its power from nuclear energy as compared to France producing 86%.5  By contrast, the U.S. generates 49% of its electricity from coal—the worst offender of GHG, whereas France only 4.1%.  What did the French do right?  Steve Kidd, Director of Strategy & Research at the World Nuclear Association, answers that question succinctly with two things lacking in the U.S.: a unified national energy policy and a standard power plant design that increases safety while cutting costs….

  Reaching the same percentage of electricity production as France would cut 2.4 billion tons of CO2 from our emissions, 129% of entire amount emitted by all of transportation.  It would reduce total CO2 emissions by nearly 40%, without burdening our economy with new costs and regulations.

• Dan Yurman notes the connection between India’s commitments on climate change and their nuclear power polcies over at his blog.
• In a press release timed to draw attention to just such a connection, Constellation Energy says “Nuclear is key to Carbon Reduction.”
  

  Constellation Energy says nuclear energy plays an indispensable role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions….

  The Baltimore-based energy producer and marketer made the comments in a statement issued Monday on the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

  Constellation says nuclear energy provides about 14 percent of the world’s commercial electricity, a number that needs to increase substantially if long-term emmission reduction goals are to be met. The company also says cap-and-trade legislation and incentives can ensure a cost-effective transition to cleaner energy if done right.

• Paul Genoa, NEI’s Policy Director, blogging from Copenhagen over at the NationJournal Blog:
  

  In policies coming out of Copenhagen and subsequent international climate meetings that will shape the trajectory of clean energy job growth in the United States. By nature, clean energy technology like nuclear energy produces high quality jobs. However, absent clear, consistent and enduring clean energy support at the international and domestic level, the clean energy economy and the jobs required to sustain it will not be achieved. If we collectively meet this challenge, our children and grandchildren will inherit a cleaner world full of promise —largely due to the economic growth driven by infrastructure development.

• Finally, Charles Barton over at Nuclear Green has an excellent post about Alan Weinberg, who prophetically wrote in the 1970s about the danger posed by the CO2 emissions from building more coal-fired power plants instead of nuclear power plants:
  

  Today Weinberg’s views on CO2 and global warming seem prophetic. In a 1976 paper “Economic Implications of A US Nuclear Moratorium. 1985 to 2010,” which Weinberg co-authored with Charles E. Whittle, Alan D. Poole, Edward L. Allen, William G. Pollard, Herbert G. MacPherson, Ned L. Treat, and Doan L. Phung, reveal to us exactly how accurate Weinberg’s vision into the future was. In the paper Weinberg and his associates assessed the the economic and environmental consequences of moratorium on nuclear construction in the United States. He assumed that no new reactors would be ordered after 1980, but that reactor construction would continue till about 1985. He then looked at the consequences to allow continued operation of reactors on line by 1985. Weinberg tried to think out the implications of the cessation of new reactor construction.

  Weinberg and his associates understood that if reactor construction ceased, power companies would construct more coal fired power plants to meet consumer demand for electricity. Weinberg assumed that consumer demand would be driven by two factors population growth, and economic growth. He also assumed that technological changes would increase the efficiency of electrical use, but that these efficiencies would not offset the increase in demand.

Let us know if you find other blog posts about the importance of nuclear power as we continue the discussion at Copenhagen…

Here’s a online form to send your greetings to the Copenhagen-15 Climate Change event. Messages sent through here will be projected onto the walls of the conference.

We encourage our friends in the nuclear blogger community to send good wishes to those participating at Copenhagen and perhaps include your hopes that nuclear power could provide a vital role in member states’ goals for carbon reduction.

Starting today (Dec. 7-18), senior representatives from over 192 nations, thousands of NGO’s, hundreds of scientists, and thousands of activists are gathering for the historic 15th annual Conference of the Parties for its Framework Convention on Climate Change, or as it’s known in short, as the “Copenhagen 15 Conference.” (Or, even shorter: “COP-15″.)

The entire event is expected to bring over 34,000 individuals — including representatives from AREVA — to Copenhagen this week to engage on climate change. The goal of the event is to collectively assess progress and issues in coping with global climate change, and to work towards a new agreement that would follow the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in three years.

Most observers suggest that the practical goal of this event is to bring a “politically binding” deal across all member nations on targets for reducing their carbon output over the next several decades. This political deal would later become an official legal deal across member companies after the event.

India, China, the EU and Japan have already described their targets. For the U.S., President Obama has announced he would attend the Conference and likely bring a U.S. commitment to reduce carbon output in stages, beginning with a 17% cut by 2020.

Many feel the Copenhagen 15 event will be a pivotal point defining IF or HOW the world would take action over the next half century combating climate change.

AREVA has long been a corporate voice championing large-scale global transitions to CO2-free clean energy, and that the planet needs to ween itself off of older dirtier fuels of our past. We hope to be a vital presence at the event. And will post our thoughts and progress here.

You can follow Copenhagen tweets on Twitter under the hashtag #COP15.

We encourage our friends in the nuclear blogger community to join the many environmental bloggers following the event, blogging about it, and making their voices heard.

Some useful links:

• COP 15 general website
• US Dept. Of State Website for the event

In an excellent editorial in The Australian, Barry Brook and Martin Nicholson, climate change scientists, make the case for nuclear power as an essential component of any climate change plan. To those who think high-profile incidents that took place twenty years ago or more make nuclear power unsafe, they talk about new safety technologies and note:

Comparing the flawed Chernobyl design to today’s reactors is like saying modern aviation is too dangerous because the Hindenburg airship exploded in 1937.

The entire editorial is really worth a read.

Kent Garber, in U.S. News & World Report, on the political support for nuclear energy, especially the second look it’s getting in the current climate legislation:

All these proposals are notable for the emerging political reality they represent. Nuclear power is low in carbon emissions, domestically generated, and it’s particularly popular in the Southeast and some Midwestern states.That means liberal Democrats, who have often railed against nuclear energy because of the radioactive waste it produces, will almost certainly have to fork over money for nuclear to win the votes for their climate bill.

Mark Flanagan of NEI is highlighting a CFR interview with Duke Energy’s CEO, James E. Rogers, in which he talks about the future of the energy industry – and the importance of nuclear energy not only for our CO2-free energy future, but also for our economy:

But the difference in the jobs is quite different, because if you’re wiping off a solar panel, it’s sort of a minimum wage type of job, [with] much higher compensation for nuclear engineers and nuclear operators. If our goal is to rebuild the middle class, nuclear plays a key role there, particularly if coal is out of the equation.

He also talks about the U.S. regaining its role as the leader in nuclear energy:

People forget that [the United States was] the innovator of nuclear energy. We developed the technologies. And what people have also forgotten is that 20 percent of our electricity comes from nuclear, and that we produce twice the amount of electricity from nuclear than any country in the world. We sit here today, not turning dirt on a single nuclear plant. [. . .] We have a competitive advantage on building nuclear, on building recycling to address the spent fuel, and that would be a great loss of opportunity if we don’t find a way to seize it and rebuild the supply.

Like Mark Flanagan said, we could spend all day highlighting great lines from this interview, but it would probably be better if you just read the interview for yourself.  You should also know that Duke Energy is teaming up with AREVA on the ADAGE joint venture focusing on the biopower sector. ADAGE was recently in the news because JEA, the energy company for Jacksonville, Florida, announced that it plans to power 40,000 homes with power generated from ADAGE’s biomass plants.  We’re proud to be working with Duke Energy and Jim Rogers, who clearly “gets it” when it comes to the future of energy generation in the U.S.

• More posts about ADAGE Biopower
• Official Website for ADAGE Biopower

by Jarret Adams

As the U.S. Congress gears up to address climate legislation, it’s hard to know what the best proposal is to address the daunting issue of climate change. There seem to be about as many proposals as there are organizations with a stake in energy and climate issues. But, here in one word is the main reason that nuclear energy matters in this conversation: scale.

Nuclear energy generates 20 percent of America’s electricity but produces 72 percent of our CO2-free electricity. That’s three times more than hydropower, the next largest contributor. According to the Energy Information Administration, the electric power sector is responsible for 40 percent of U.S. emissions of CO2.

Therefore, even a relatively modest increase in the share of nuclear generation would have a major impact on reducing CO2 emissions from the power sector. This also would help move us toward the 80 percent reduction by 2050 that many congressional leaders are discussing.

In fact, the EPA analysis of the Waxman-Markey legislation found in its core scenario that meeting this emissions reduction scenario would require a 150 percent increase in U.S. nuclear generation – this would call for building as many as 180 new reactors by 2050!

Still, we at AREVA don’t believe nuclear energy is the only answer. We are rapidly working to develop new biopower plants through our ADAGE joint venture with Duke Energy. We’re also active in wind power and are scouting new locations for an offshore wind farm in North America using our 5 MW turbines that we are currently installing off the coast of Germany.

Jason Ribeiro has a great post up over at Pro-Nuclear Democrats highlighting a CNN-Money poll showing that fully 76% of those polled believe that nuclear power is a “safe, clean alternative right now” for our nation’s energy needs.
 

 
Now, being a web poll it’s unscientific, but the overwhelming support for nuclear energy speaks for itself.  Ribeiro’s key point is about the media’s desire to paint nuclear power as something “controversial” when the reality is that overwhelming majorities see the need for nuclear power to be part of our CO2-free energy future.  Does the presence of a loud but small minority make the issue “controversial” when, according to this poll at least, over three quarters of Americans support nuclear power right now?
 
But the key quote comes at the end:
 

Based on the feedback from these stories, we can clearly see people have been doing better homework by checking different sources on the internet and deciding for themselves who is the more credible source.  I think Americans are also getting sick and tired of being told they cannot move forward with the most powerful clean energy source ever discovered simply because the government is too incompetent to deal with what amounts to a small warehouse of spent nuclear fuel.

 
We certainly wouldn’t use the word “incompetent,” but we agree that the U.S. government needs to step it up, particularly when it comes to approving and helping put in place a used fuel recycling program like France has successfully operated for decades now.  As we’ve talked about on multiple occasions, recycling offers a solid solution to the used nuclear fuel “problem.”

I support nuclear on its own. But I think it’s one of the key bridges that I can help build to bring people across the bridge to support global warming legislation. I think we are making progress on that….it will be significant if Senator Boxer can bring the bill out of the committee before Copenhagen.

Independent Senator Joe Lieberman, when asked: “Do you gain votes in the climate change bill by adding a strong nuclear provision?”

John Wheeler of This Week in Nuclear, in his an excellent post up on The Energy Collective, pointed us to a recent study from the Nature Conservancy on the “Land Use Intensity” of nuclear energy versus other forms of energy.  The study, “Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency,” looks at the impact of various energy-generation methods on natural habitats (measured in square kilometers per terawatt-hour) and comes to the conclusion that aside from increasing efficiency, nuclear power has the smallest land-use footprint of all forms of energy generation – including green technologies like wind, geothermal, and solar!

As you can see from the chart, it only takes 2.4 square kilometers of land to produce one terawatt-hour of energy in a nuclear reactor – just one-third of the impact of the next most efficient form of generation, geothermal, and just one-sixth the impact of solar thermal power.

Why is this important?  As climate change becomes a reality, preserving natural habitats – the Nature Conservancy’s mission – will become more and more crucial.  The energy we generate in the future needs to not only have a low-impact with regards to carbon emissions and pollutants, but also be efficient in terms of land use.  Just as “suburban sprawl” can gobble up natural and wilderness habitats that had previously supported diverse ecosystems, so too can “energy sprawl.”

The Nature Conservancy is concerned that as our energy appetite increases and we become more and more concerned about carbon emissions, we’ll go to methods of power generation that require the destruction of natural habitats for things like farming corn or soy for biofuels.  Nuclear power, they say, has the least amount of land-use impact of all forms of power generation.  Nothing can substitute for more efficiency, obviously. It’s clear from the study that efficiency gains (including, we might add, smart grid technology) would result in net decreases in land use.  But if we’re going to build more power plants, nuclear power will use the least amount of land.

This, combined with the NEI study we previously highlighted showing that nuclear energy is just as carbon-efficient as solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, and wind power, makes it even clearer: the world’s green energy future must involve nuclear power.  Safe, reliable, clean, CO2-free nuclear power must be a crucial component of any carbon-reduction plan.