London, 20 March 2011

Global efforts to control climate change could fail with a total freeze on nuclear power, an analyst at French bank Societe Generale said on Friday. “At the present stage of energy technologies, controlling climate change will probably be out of reach without nuclear generation,” Emmanuel Fages, head of the bank’s power, gas, carbon and coal research wrote in a report.

“Confronted with the heightened perception of nuclear risk following the Japanese disaster, populations might have to choose, through their vote, between this nuclear risk and runaway climate risk,” the report said.

Japanese officials this week scrambled to avert a nuclear catastrophe after several reactors were damaged by the country’s largest earthquake on record and ensuing tsunami a week ago.

The nuclear disaster has triggered global alarm and reviews of safety at atomic power plants around the world, particularly in Germany, where the government ordered a three-month shutdown of seven plants built before 1980.

Fages said a global freeze on nuclear expansion would mean there is little chance of cutting world greenhouse gas emissions to levels so that the global temperature rise is below 2C as recommended by a UN panel of scientists.

Annual global emissions, at about 50 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent today, would need to fall back to 1990 levels of around 40 billion tonnes by 2030 in order to avoid significant climate change, he said.

Fages said a global freeze on nuclear expansion projects would mean an additional 280 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in annual average emissions over the next 20 years.

And if existing plants are retired and replaced with fossil-fuel burning generation and some renewables, then annual emissions could increase by as much as 860 million tonnes on average over the period 2010-2030.

Nobuo Tanaka, chief of the International Energy Agency, told Reuters on Thursday that any derailment of nuclear power projects would hurt efforts to limit emissions and contain global warming.

"The cost of fighting against global warming will increase, that is sure," he said in an interview in Oslo. "I think it is very difficult (to fight global warming), even impossible, without using nuclear power."

The disaster in Japan, however, will likely spur demand for renewable energy as well as natural gas as an alternative to nuclear power, he said. But Socgen's Fages pointed out that an accelerated expansion of renewable energy is expensive and faces technical power grid constraints.

New technology, such as carbon capture and storage, could make big cuts in emissions from coal-fired power and gas plants, but this is unlikely to be available at a significant scale before 2030, he said.

Energy efficiency policies, meanwhile, “have failed to attract real attention except in a very limited number of countries”.

“Nuclear is seen by many only as a ‘bridge’ to the future zero-emission power technologies to be developed and made economical for large scale deployment,” Fages said. He added: “But this bridge is necessary.”

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