cover image: What Policies, Corporate Strategies and Changes in Awareness are needed to Combat Climate Change?

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What Policies, Corporate Strategies and Changes in Awareness are needed to Combat Climate Change?

16 Jun 2021

What then needs to change in order for societies to achieve their climate goals? We already have the evidence from Germany that switching to renewables at the expense of nuclear does not result in reduction of CO2 emissions, so it would seem that inclusion of nuclear power in the energy mix is a pre-requisite. [...] The World Nuclear Association puts forward an even more ambitious scenario than the IEA – the Harmony programme proposes the addition of 1000 GWe of new nuclear capacity by 2050, to provide 25% of electricity then (about 10,000 TWh) from 1250 GWe of capacity (after allowing for 150 GWe retirements)4. [...] The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE)5 is a method of comparing forms of electricity generation by using the average revenue per unit of electricity generated that would be required to recover the costs of building and operating a generating plant during an assumed financial life and duty cycle. [...] While nuclear engineers revel in building shiny new designs, perhaps for the sake of climate change we should concentrate at the present time on building a standardised design of reactor to speed up new nuclear power generation, before it is too late and the climate spirals out of control. [...] By rejecting nuclear power as a source of low-carbon energy, because of our lack of perspective on its real risk and expense, we expose ourselves to the much greater risks (both in terms of health and the global economy) posed by climate change.

Authors

Gerry Thomas

Pages
4
Published in
Japan