Premier Debate 2016 September/October ld brief

AFF – A2 Warming DA

Nuclear power can’t solve warming – it would require one reactor a week for 52 years

Caldicott 6 [Helen; Founder and President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute; “Nuclear Power is not the answer”; [Premier]

Setting aside the energetic costs of the whole fuel cycle, and looking just at the Nuclear Industry's claim that what transpires in the nuclear plants is "clean and green," the following conditions would have to be met for nuclear power actually to make the substantial contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions that the industry claims is possible (this analysis assumes 2% or more growth in global electricity demand): •All present-day nuclear power plants-441-would have to be replaced by new ones. •Half the electricity growth would have to be provided by nuclear power. •Half of all the world's coal fired plants would have to be replaced by nuclear power plants.²⁸ This would mean the construction over the next fifty years of some 2,000 to 3,000 nuclear reactors of 1,000 megawatt size-one per week for fifty years! Considering the eight to ten years it takes to construct a new reactor and the finite supply of uranium fuel, such an enterprise is simply not viable.

Nuclear power plant construction and uranium mining emits as much carbon as a natural gas plant.

Sovacool, 07 [Benjamin; Senior Research Fellow for the Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research and professor of Government and International Affairs at Virginia Tech; “What's Really Wrong With Nuclear Power?”; 11/30; http://scitizen.com/stories/Future-Energies/2007/11/What-s-Really-Wrong-With-Nuclear-Power/; [Premier]

Third and finally, nuclear power plants are not carbon neutral. The Oxford Research Group concludes that the nuclear fuel cycle is responsible for emitting 84 to 122 grams of carbon dioxide per every kWh, mostly from uranium mining, plant construction, and plant decommissioning. The report also notes that these emissions are around half of that as natural gas plants (so we are talking about some serious carbon). In addition, the International Atomic Energy Agency notes that uranium is getting harder to mine, meaning that the carbon emissions related to nuclear will get worse as more uranium gets depleted, not better. This is because mining uranium ores of relatively low grades and greater depth is much more energy intensive. If world nuclear generating share remains what it is today, the Oxford Research Group concludes that by 2050 nuclear power would generate as much carbion dioxide per kWh as a comparable gas-fired power station.

Nuclear power produces no net energy—the difficulty of uranium extraction means CO2 emissions are the same

Caldicott 6 [Helen; Founder and President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute; “Nuclear Power is not the answer”; [Premier]

While currently the creation of nuclear electricity emits only one-third the amount of CO₂ emitted from a similar-sized, conventional gas generator, this is a transitory statistic. Over several decades, as the concentration of available uranium ore declines, more fossil fuels will be required to extract the ore from less concentrated ore veins. Within ten to twenty years, nuclear reactors will produce no net energy because of the massive amounts of fossil fuel that will be necessary to mine and to enrich the remaining poor grades of uranium. (The nuclear power industry contends that large quantities of uranium can be obtained by .reprocessing radioactive spent fuel. However, this process is extremely expensive; medically dangerous for nuclear workers, and releases large amounts of radioactive material into the air and water; it is therefore not a pragmatic consideration.) By extension, the operation of nuclear power plants will then produce exactly the same amounts of greenhouse gases and air pollution as standard power plants. Contrary to the nuclear industry claims, smoothly running nuclear power plants are also not emission free. Government regulations allow nuclear plants "routinely" to emit hundreds of thousands of curies of radioactive gases and other radioactive elements into the environment every year.

Carbon pricing solves warming anyway-no impact

IEA 15 ["Technology Roadmap: Nuclear Energy." IEA Technology Roadmaps (n.d.): n. pag. 2015. [Premier]

Carbon pricing remains the central pillar of any low-carbon policy. Whether as a carbon trading scheme, carbon tax or as a mandate on utilities to use low-carbon sources, incentives for investing in low-carbon energy are needed to help accelerate the deployment of nuclear energy. In the absence of a sufficiently high carbon price that reflects the externalities of fossil-fuelled generation, governments will have to continue providing policy solutions that improve the net present value of low-carbon investments and mitigate the market risks for project developers and financial investors.

The use of nuclear plants for energy have offset some carbon emissions

Turkenberg 03 [William C. Turkenberg, professor STS, Copernicus Institute, Utrecht University, “Nuclear Energy and Sustainable Development,” International Conference held in Vienna, organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency, June 23, 2003] [Premier]

One of the major issues to be solved to achieve a sustainable development of economic, social and ecological systems is the threat of a severe climate change within a short period caused by human behavior. The emission of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, due to the manner in which we fulfill our demand for energy services, is the major cause. Nuclear energy provides about 16% of the amount of electricity produced globally. It contributes about 7% of the global primary energy demand (29 EJ of 418 EJ in total in 2001). In the year 2001 about 440 nuclear power plants, operating in thirty-one different countries, had a total installed capacity of nearly 360 GWe and generated about 2500 TWh electricity [1]. Almost four-fifths of these power plants are of the Light-Water type. The short-term prospect for nuclear power is opaque. There is no strong increase in installed nuclear capacity at present. Although the annual additions in installed capacity arrived at peak values of about 30,000 MWe in the mid eighties, this figure decreased to some thousand MWe in the nineties. In fact, new nuclear power plants are not built fast enough to maintain nuclear power’s 16% share of global electricity generation [1], as the annual increase of the nuclear output with about two and a half percent a year is less than the three to four percent growth rate of the world’s electricity consumption. Most analysts project that nuclear energy’s contribution to the global energy budget will not grow and may even decline during the initial decades of the 21st century. Without nuclear energy, the present global emissions of CO2 due to our energy consumption would have been about 7% higher, depending on the fossil fuel use that is replaced. For nuclear energy to make a significant contribution to coping with climate change, nuclear capacity must be increased by at least an order of magnitude. Technically, this is feasible, as nuclear energy could contribute 200 EJ or more per year to the world energy consumption in the second half of the 21st century [3, 7, 8]. Further application of nuclear energy could contribute not only to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, but also to a decreased emission of other pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, small particulates and volatile organic compounds. It would also help to limit the dependence on fossil fuels, to meet security of supply concerns, and to guard against potentially escalating fossil fuel prices.