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"Low-carbon" Misses the Point: Arguments Favoring Nuclear Power as a Climate "Solution" are Fundamentally Misframed

Lovins, Amory B.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/06/low-carbon-misses-the-point-arguments-favoring-nuclear-power-as-a-climate-solution-are-fundamentally-misframed/

Publisher:  CounterPunch
Date Written:  06/10/2021
Year Published:  2021  
Resource Type:  Article

The view that climate protection requires expanding nuclear power has a basic flaw in its prevailing framing: it rarely if ever relates climate-effectiveness to cost or to speed -- even though stopping climate change requires scaling the fastest and cheapest solutions. By focusing on carbon but only peripherally mentioning cost and speed, and by not relating these three variables, this approach misframes what climate solutions must do.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

The climate argument for using nuclear power assumes that since nuclear power generation directly releases no CO2, it can be an effective climate solution. It can't, because new (or even existing) nuclear generation costs more per kWh than carbon-free competitors—efficient use and renewable power—and thus displaces less carbon per dollar (or, by separate analysis, per year): less not by a small margin but by about an order of magnitude (factor of roughly ten).

Thus nuclear power not only isn't a silver bullet, but, by using it, we shoot ourselves in the foot, thereby shrinking and slowing climate protection compared with choosing the fastest, cheapest tools. It is essential to look at nuclear power’s climate performance compared to its or its competitors' cost and speed. That comparison is at the core of answering the question about whether to include nuclear power in climate mitigation.

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