Abstract
Nuclear fission is a primary energy source that may be important to future efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The energy return on investment (EROI) of any energy source is important because aggregate global EROI must be maintained at a minimum level to support complex global systems. Previous studies considering nuclear EROI have emphasised energy investments linked to ‘enabling’ factors (upstream activities that enable the operation of nuclear technology such as fuel enrichment), have attracted controversy, and challenges also persist regarding system boundary definition. This study advocates that improved consideration of ‘amelioration’ factors (downstream activities that remediate nuclear externalities such as decommissioning), is an important task for calculating a realistic nuclear EROI. Components of the ‘nuclear system’ were analysed and energy investment for five representative ‘amelioration’ factors calculated. These ‘first approximation’ calculations made numerous assumptions, exclusions, and simplifications, but accounted for a greater level of detail than had previously been attempted. The amelioration energy costs were found to be approximately 1.5–2 orders of magnitude lower than representative ‘enabling’ costs. Future refinement of the ‘amelioration’ factors may indicate that they are of greater significance, and may also have characteristics making them systemically significant, notably in terms of timing in relation to future global EROI declines.
Highlights
Civil nuclear fission energy has made a contribution to the world primary energy mix for the last 70 years, generating approximately 10% of the world’s electricity output today, down from a peak of approximately 17% during the 1980s [1,2,3,4,5]
Civil nuclear fission energy has contributed to global energy supply for approximately 70 years, but the energy return on investment (EROI) that this energy source provides has only been incompletely described in the existing literature
The definition of a value for nuclear EROI is vital because complex global society demands a minimum value, and an expansion of nuclear capacity has been mooted to assist with greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions
Summary
Civil nuclear fission energy has made a contribution to the world primary energy mix for the last 70 years, generating approximately 10% of the world’s electricity output today (equating to approximately 4.5% of world primary energy supply in 2018), down from a peak of approximately 17% during the 1980s [1,2,3,4,5]. The possibility of a ‘renaissance’ (i.e., a reversal of the declining contribution described above) has been suggested in some quarters in light of the increasingly urgent global efforts to achieve substantial and meaningful greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions [6,7,8,9] This possibility is based on the ability of this technology to generate steady, reliable, and controllable energy output with much lower carbon emissions than emitted by fossil fuel generation [10], and future expansion could potentially be substantial [5]. It must be viewed in the context of the increases in the political, financial, social, and technical feasibility of large-scale renewables generation that have occurred in recent decades [11], which lead in turn to further questions over the ‘room’ for nuclear increases and the ‘compatibility’ of nuclear with renewables
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