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Which is worse, gas or nuclear?

19 September 2011, 21:39 CET
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There are many good people working for Greenpeace who are genuinely and deeply convinced that nuclear power is not part of the solution. But they are wrong to suggest that gas is an adequate low-carbon bridge technology.

Greenpeace has published a report arguing that Japan could get 43% of its electricity from renewables by 2020 (see Japan Times).  So it could, though that would be a quadrupling of renewables’ contribution from the 2008 contribution in just 12 years, and that’s just electricity – not heating or transport fuel. Most of the transport fuel in Japan, as everywhere else at present, is oil, and most of the heating fuel is gas (see  this article).

Greenpeace argues that Japan should phase out its nuclear stations by the end of next year, and replace them with gas power stations, which pollute less than coal or oil stations do. This is correct.  But gas power stations produce over three  times as much carbon dioxide per unit of electricity as nuclear stations do (see this article).

So the crucial question is this: is gas a sufficiently low-carbon technology to act as a bridge until we can be 100% reliant on renewables? Or, more bluntly, is nuclear worse than gas? Nuclear power obviously has serious disadvantages: cost, proliferation risk and risk of accidents. Thorium molten salt reactors would reduce the risk of proliferation  and accident, but wouldn’t be cheap (see this article).

But gas also has serious disadvantages. Its carbon emissions are much too high to make it a low-carbon bridge technology, unless it is combined with carbon capture and storage – which has yet to be demonstrated at scale and also won’t be cheap. And much of the gas has to be imported from countries run by undemocratic or dubiously democratic governments – think Iran or Russia. The USA now has plenty of its own gas due to shale gas which it extracts by cracking open rocks and getting the gas out. This is good in energy security and economic terms, but the lifecycle climate impact of shale gas remains essentially unknown. One study by Cornell University argues that the emissions from shale gas are as high as from coal (see New York Times), though this report is highly contested.

Even if one assumes that the emissions from shale gas are similar to those from conventional gas, the fact remains that the global climate cannot afford the emissions from four or five more decades of burning gas. Climate change is the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced – greater than any danger posed by nuclear power. So gas is worse than nuclear.

Having worked for Greenpeace for several years, I try to avoid criticising the organisation. Greenpeace is forty years old today, and was founded as part of an anti-nuclear weapons campaign (hence the name). And being anti-nuclear is not just part of a historical hangover – there are many good people working for Greenpeace who are genuinely and deeply convinced that nuclear power is not part of the solution.  But they are wrong to suggest that gas is an adequate low-carbon bridge technology.

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Climate change is the most serious issue ever to have faced humanity. Rightly, it is now high on the public, political, media and business agendas. However, too much of the discussion is still about what we should not be doing or what we should be against. There is not enough discussion or information on solutions - what we can and should do to minimise dangerous climate change, and what should be done to make us not only safer and more secure, but also richer and happier.


Stephen Tindale photoStephen Tindale (29 March 1963 – 1 July 2017) was a British environmentalist who was Executive Director of Greenpeace UK from 2000 to 2005. He was Director of The Alvin Weinberg Foundation, co-founder of the organisation Climate Answers, Associate Fellow at the Centre for European Reform and co-author of Repowering Communities with Prashant Vaze.