Do renewables really use more land than nuclear power?
Yesterday, we saw nuclear reactor builders AREVA citing a study that said ‘nuclear power has the smallest land-use footprint of all forms of energy generation’.
The thing is, there’s actually quite a bit of disagreement on the matter. The study ‘Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United States of America’ isn’t the only one to examine the issue.
In his paper ‘Four Nuclear Myths’, Amory B. Lovins, Chairman and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute shows that…
…windpower is far less land-intensive than nuclear power; [solar] photovoltaics spread across land [is] comparable to nuclear if mounted on the ground in average U.S. sites, but much or most of that land… can be shared with lifestock or wildlife, and PVs use no land if mounted on structures, as ~90% now are.
The paper ‘Improving the ecological footprint of nuclear energy: a risk-based lifecycle assessment approach for critical infrastructure systems’ (from the International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, Vol. 1, No. 4.) estimates that nuclear’s land-use footprint is four times higher than coal…
Specifically, a lifecycle assessment of nuclear energy production is important because it captures the release of radionuclides and other toxic materials into the environment... It is concluded that, when critical infrastructure risks are taken into consideration, the actual nuclear footprint may be significantly higher than previous footprint calculations.
Would AREVA care to cite a study taking all this into account?
(And there’s one thing that hasn’t been mentioned: energy efficiency doesn’t use any land at all.)
Comments
Its not just the installation footprint that has to be considered. The footprint left by both mining uranium and by long-term radioactive waste storage and disposal has to be added in.
Posted by: Jim Kemeny | November 6, 2009 5:37 PM
Would AREVA care to cite a study taking all this into account?
NEI will. You can read about how Lovins cherry-picks his land-use data right here.
Posted by: David Bradish | November 6, 2009 8:07 PM
Bravo, I see you can't publish my comment from Friday that pointed readers to a rebuttal to this post's land use claims. What's Greenpeace afraid of that they can't allow a rebutting comment?
Posted by: David Bradish | November 9, 2009 5:06 PM
Thanks for your comment, David and sorry for missing your deadline. Areva must be grateful for your defence - they could use all the help they can get right now. Thanks for pointing out Amory Lovins' 'cherry-picking' although it's Areva's that concerns us most at the moment. And of course Lovins' isn't the only study available (nor the
only one we mentioned).
Posted by: Justin | November 10, 2009 10:58 AM
Hi David Bradish. Not surprising you found the NEI note - you wrote it yourself! But you've been cherry-picking yourself as well. Lovins argues quite well why he takes his numbers. The numbers for wind in the Spitzley and Keoleian, for instance, are based on the 'one lamp-post needs a parking lot' footprint premise. The base-load blog you made later goes even further... 'providing cheap baseload electricity' is the newest NEI lifebuoy for nuclear since 'cheap' cannot be used any longer... Just remember, David: baseload/peakload is outdated paradigm from the last century. Grid management is a flexible business today, and Lovins got that - you didn't. I know - the Nuclear Energy Institute is not a scientific institute, but a lobby machine for the nuclear industry. Fair enough...
Posted by: Jan Haverkamp - Greenpeace | November 10, 2009 6:43 PM