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Researchers at Japan’s Ritsumeikan University analyzed the environmental impact of nuclear power generation through an unusual measure – the volume of resources extracted from the lithosphere during the life cycle of this process.
Their study focused on the mining methods, the different grades of uranium ore mined – a highly variable entity – and their effect on the total material requirement (TMR), the nuclear reactor types, and the type of uranium fuel cycle system used during nuclear power generation, and how all of these factors alter the process’ environmental impact.
Published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, the research points out that even though life cycle assessments (LCA) have been conducted to evaluate the life cycle cumulative energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions related to electricity generated via nuclear power, such indicators don’t account for the total resources used throughout the process.
“An LCA of the resource use for 1kWh nuclear power generation based on uranium was performed by analyzing TMR,” Shoki Kosai, corresponding author of the study, said in a media statement.
“We looked at both open and closed fuel cycles, and three types of uranium mining methods: open-pit mining, underground mining, and in-situ leaching (ISL), apart from other variables in nuclear power generation, for a thorough LCA.”
GHG emissions and natural resource usage were subsequently evaluated for these variables.
The researchers found that the TMR coefficient (indicating the mining intensity) of enriched uranium fuel was the highest, followed by nuclear fuel, reprocessed uranium fuel, mixed oxide (MOX) fuel, and lastly, yellow cake.
The grade of uranium ore had a huge impact on the TMR coefficient as well, which meant that TMR varied significantly with different mining methods. In situ leaching had the lowest TMR. However, the mining method had a more significant impact on resource utilization as compared to its impact on GHG emissions.
“We found that a closed cycle that reprocesses uranium fuel uses 26% lower resources than an open cycle that does not reuse its by-products,” co-author Eiji Yamasue said.
Additionally, the scientist and his colleagues found that the natural resource use of nuclear power generation was similar to that of renewable energy and significantly lower than that of thermal power generation.
Further, the global warming potential and TMR of nuclear power generation showed very different trends. Along with lower GHG emissions, nuclear power generation also used fewer natural resources, making it an environmentally favourable source of power generation.
“Maintaining a circular economy, even for resource use, is important. Our findings can assist policymakers in formulating long-term energy policies which consider electricity and power generation using nuclear power,” Kosai said.
7 Comments
Brett Cole
This is all very good, except for the fact that man has not yet been able to dispose of the waste products of this process in an environmentally friendly way!
Not telling!
True, but man knows how to deal with it (underground disposal) following man-millenia of research. Given the huge benefits to mankind in the short term, we must all have to consider the bigger picture. Unfortunately, the opposing views are very loud and in most cases comprise of individuals who live close by and primarily concerned about the immediate and personal impact on them (house price and jobs). I have yet met someone who opposes such projects for purely altruistic reasons. Also the truth is that humans are probably not going to survive long enough for any potential ‘unknown unknowns’ to surface (pardon the pun).
Todd Richardson
As is usually the case, externalities are completely ignored in this study. And no mention of subsidies. Sorry, not buying it.
Mr John Gray
Oh, what: wind and solar farms and all those domestic roof top panels haven’t been subsidised?! Get real.
William Tahil
Many nuclear power plants in the USA have been shuttered because they are not financially viable – even with the taxpayer shouldering cleanup and insurance – and the rest are waiting on continuing and new subsidies to keep going. Free market? Look at the bigget NPP in the USA – built near Phoenix in the desert (miles from essential cooling water). It is cooled by treated sewage water from Phoenix. Where does Phoenix get all its water from? The Colorado River – it has to be pumped uphill from 100 miles away – a coal fired power station was built to power the pumps. What a joke. Whatever the reasons were for that NPP to be built, they were nothing to do with economics – only Voodoo Economics. You can’t even “shut down” an NPP becuse you have to keep cooling the core – even if you remove teh fuel, it has to go into a cooling pond – if the cooling fails, it boils dry in 72 hours and spews melting radioactive fuel into the building. How does an NPP provide emergency power to itself if it loses essential off site power to keep teh cooling systems going? Diesel Generators – unreliable and prone to failure when needed. An NPP cannot even power its own systems and safety systems from the power it produces itself. And they are all like that. What design madness.
William Tahil
An NPP is simply a kettle that boils water to drive a steam turbine to then drive an alternator. There is no more insane, expensive, mammoth resource consuming and mind bogglingly more dangerous conceivable way to boil water than with a nuclear reactor.
A kettle to boil some water – that’s all it is.
When a few parabolic mirrors reflecting the sun’s rays on some salt or a tower with a propeller on it will do the same thing for free, cleanly, no fuel – with no vilely toxic waste that will never be safe, no mining, transport and refining of toxic uranium ore, no multiple safety trains, no complex multiple hydraulic systems, no complex redundant process control systems, no underground control room bunkers, no multiple coolant systems, no huge backup diesel generators needed to try and keep the NPP unit “safe” in the event of a loss of offsite power that then don’t work when needed, no radiation barriers, no concrete containment drums meters thick, no huge water tanks to flood the molten core when it falls out of the pressure vessel, no thick basemat to try and contain that molten core at 5000 deg C, no dead cert risk of a hydrogen explosion when the water hits the molten corium, no multiple ventilation systems with fire dampers and iodine 131 filters, no thousands of tonnes of precision machined stainless steel components, no neutron radiation sensors, no neutron embrittlement of steel making it fail and endanger the plant, no thousands of process control sensors like an aircraft all over the plant, no pharaonic quantities of concrete, one of the most GHG producing materials to produce – and no need to design and build the whole NPP to Earthquake Resistant construction standards with an Aircraft Crash Protection shell over the top to stop terrorists kamikazing it – no nothing but a few parabolic mirrors heating water or salt in a glass tube and the useless deserts of the world could produce more electricity for free than we could dream of even using or some wind turbines offshore that the Fukushima tsunami would have simply passed by as a two foot swell with no effect.
I just counted up the number of discrete Systems in one of the latest types of NPPs – about 112 discrete named acronymed systems to handle various parts of the plant operation. What complexity just to boil water.
Just get this – upstream of the generator in a wind turbine you have a gearbox and a propeller. That’s all.
Upstream of the generator in an NPP you have a barely controlled atomic bomb with unbelievable complexity to contain it.
How any “engineer” can possibly, for one moment, consider NPPs as an acceptable “engineering solution” to the objective of generating electricity is absolutely mind bogglingly beyond belief. It can only be by total ignorance of the reality of what goes into a Nuclear Power Plant.
William Tahil
The article of course fails to mention the full life cycle analyses published in the 2000s by Storm and Smith and Leuwen and Smith. It correctly initimates that uranium ore quality is critical but fails to reveal that all the best ores are gone now and the amount of energy needed for refining and enriching Uranium to 5% U235 is enormous and a major constraint on the future if nuclear power now teh best ores are gone.
In fact NUclear Power has a poor Energy Balance and high CO2 emissions. van Leuwen and Smith showed 150% more energy is required to build and operate an NPP than will be ever generated in electricity. Storm and Smith show in 2007 that 50% of the energy ever generated is needed up front to build the plant. As for CO2 emissions, due to declining ore quality and the pharanonic quantities of concrete and stainless steel needed to build an NPP, nuclear produces 60 g CO2 per kWh (ISA study) and over 200 g CO2 per kWh with poor ores, compared to 20 – 100 g CO2/kWh for wind and photovoltaic (solar thermal should be down there with wind since it is simple technology, not high tech solar panels requiring molten silicon refining).