Nuclear power plant construction CO2 emissions?

Question

Is is true that building one nuclear plant emits the same amount of carbon dioxide as one coal plant operating for 100 years or so?

Everyone talks about how much CO2 various energy sources emit when in operation, but what about the entire life cycle emissions of each energy source, including the carbon emissions of building the power plant, solar panel, wind turbine, etc.? Can anyone list the CO2 emissions for building each of the various energy sources as well as their operating emissions?

Answer 1

No its not true.  Which common sense would tellyou if you tried using your brain.

Answer 2

CO2 is not a problem ,it is just part of the plants recycle system. Plants can not give us O2 without CO2 . The secrete is this is also part of our fossil fuels recycle system.

Answer 3

Utter rubbish.

Studies have already been done that look at the carbon footprint over the complete lifecycle for various energy generation types. Here's a summary, in gCO2/kWh:

Coal: > 1000

Coal gasification: 800

Oil: 650

Gas: 500

Biomass: 25 to 93

Photovoltaics: 35 to 58

Wave/tidal: 25 to 50

Hydroelectric (reservoir): 10 to 30

Hyroelectric (run of river): 5

Wind: 5

Nuclear: 5

Nuclear power has one of the lowest carbon footprints available, and is the only low-footprint baseload technology that can be deployed anywhere, regardless of local weather conditions. Coal produces 200 times the carbon footprint of nuclear on a watt-for-watt basis.

Nobody who is serious about stopping global warming should be against nuclear power.

http://www.parliament.uk/documents/uploa...

Answer 4

It is probably not 100 years, but both building and decommissioning nuclear plants have major environmental implications. There have been several full-scale life-cycle assessments done to date, and they all seem to find that nuclear power does end up emitting some carbon dioxide, but not as much as coal or other thermal plants.

Answer 5

Are you one of these global warming alarmist here are some articles to educate you on the myth

http://www.larryelder.com/globalwarming....

here is a site which provides a good education on the subject

http://pushback.com

search under energy and you will see nuclear is the most efficent and affordable form of energy

Answer 6

This is an interesting question.  Even if it's not true, it's important to consider the amount of energy that goes into the construction of various types of power plants.

The construction and operation of a nuclear power plant requires 2.469 x 10^16 Joules of energy.

http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf11.html

However, it's difficult to convert that to CO2 emissions because it depends on what your enegy source is for the construction.

The website linked above also has a table showing life cycle CO2 emissions for the various energy sources.  The amount of CO2 emitted per kWh enegy produced for a nuclear plant is similar to that of wind power, and far below coal power.

So no, it's not true that building a nuclear power plant emits nearly as much CO2 as operating a coal power plant.

Answer 7

No, it's a lie generated by US environmentalists. They want to keep the US hostage to high energy prices while the National forests, i.e CA burn!