“There are huge storage problems with nuclear power,” said Norwegian Environment Minister Erik Solheim, whose country has

never had nuclear power. Oslo favours a drive for technology to bury carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel power plants.

Still, Pachauri’s U.N. climate panel said in 2007 that “nuclear power is an effective greenhouse gas mitigation option”.

The panel quoted a study saying that nuclear power already avoids 1.5 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases a year compared with the world average emissions for electricity generation. By comparison, Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2005 were 1.4 billion tonnes. Other studies put emissions from nuclear higher because of factors such as ore processing and decommissioning.

And there are public doubts about the environmental impact, alongside fears of terrorist attacks on plants or that states might use the technology to make bombs.

Even for developing nations, nuclear power could be an attractive environmental option. It could help countries such as China to curb smog in cities including Beijing. In India, one IAEA study indicated that nuclear power could compete more than 800 km from coal mines because of high transport costs.

There are temporary storage sites for waste but no permanent repositories “yet exist for high-level waste such as spent light-water reactor fuel,” the UN Climate Panel said. However, future technologies might allow recycling of the waste before it needed to be buried forever.
-Alister Doyle (Reuters)