[The Impact Of Climate Change On Nuclear Power Plant In France ]

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Assessment Of The Climate Change Vulnerability Of Nuclear Power Plants In France

Introduction

Numerous analysts from industry, commerce, government, academia, and non-profits have promoted nuclear power as an appropriate mitigation for climate change. In essentially all cases the logic of the proposal is simple and appealing:• climate change results primarily from burning fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide to the atmosphere;

• nuclear power yields no carbon emissions as electricity is generated;

• therefore nuclear power is an appropriate, indeed perhaps ideal, mitigation for climate change.

Appealing as this logic model appears, it unfortunately ignores a wide range of other issues, each of which impinges upon the quest for reduced carbon emissions. Thus it is too simplistic and seriously misleads. The argument leads to easy conclusions about the suitability of nuclear power to temper climate change when in fact a more robust analysis suggests the opposite conclusion.

Perhaps the single most important factor undermining the simple logic model stems from the fact that nuclear reactors require enormous amounts of water to cool or condense the coolant which transfers heat from the core to the turbines and cools the reactor core. This is why nuclear power plants are located near substantial amounts of water: the ocean, large lakes, and big rivers. If climate change affects the temperature, quality, or quantity of water, then existing nuclear power plants may be adversely affected.

This paper examines several ways in which climate change has already affected water in ways that create problems for existing nuclear power plants. Specifically it examines the effects of sea level rise on nine existing coastal sites in the USA and the consequences of changes in water for inland reactors in France. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) models of sea level rise and a review of existing reports and published literature suggest that numerous existing plants have been or may be adversely affected by climate change.

We call the set of interactions among climate change, water, and nuclear power the “adaptation-mitigation dilemma.” This term signals that existing and projected climate change threatens the operations and safety of existing plants and poses other challenges to efforts to adapt to climate change. Thus existing nuclear power plants may not represent a good technology for mitigation of climate change.

A separate question concerns the potential of new nuclear power plants to avoid the problems with water we identify in this paper. Maybe it is possible to build new plants that do not suffer the syndrome of problems in the adaptation-mitigation ...