UPDATE: I AM INFORMED THAT THE MATERIAL REPORTED BY EURACTIV AND REPRODUCED BELOW IS COMPREHENSIVELY WRONG. APPARENTLY MR. SAWYER IS NOT A CONTRIBUTOR TO THE IPCC AND THE REPORT DOES NOT DISCUSS NUCLEAR POWER. I HAVE UPDATED THIS POST ACCORDINGLY. THE EURACTIV NEWS STORY POSTED UP YESTERDAY REMAINS IN ERROR.
Just about everything in the following Euractiv news story is incorrect:
. . . Steve Sawyer, who contributed a chapter to an upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on managing climate disasters, which will be published in May. . .
According to Sawyer, the forthcoming IPCC report will reveal that carbon emissions from nuclear power facilities clock up between 100 and 200 grams of carbon emissions per kilowatt hour (kWh). 'Clean' gas emits around 350 grams of carbon per kilowatt hour.
But wind turbines emit no carbon when producing electricity.
One life-cycle assessment of the Vestas V90-3.0MW onshore turbine – which includes the manufacture of components – found that even here, only 4.64 grams of CO2 per kWh were created.
"Nuclear power is generally the most expensive, complicated and dangerous means ever devised by human beings to boil water," Sawyer said, summing up the anti-nuclear argument.
"Why anyone would want to use it to generate electricity is beyond me, unless they were interested - as most European states were in the early days of nuclear history - in what comes out the other end, which is fissionable material for nuclear weapons," he added.