How much can nuclear energy do about global warming?

a paper by

André Berger, Tom Blees, Francois-Marie Breon, Barry W. Brook, Philippe Hansen, Ravi.B.Grover, Claude Guet, Weiping Liu, Frederic Livet, Herve Nifenecker, Michel Petit, Gérard Pierre, Henri Prévot, Sébastien Richet, Henri Safa, Massimo Salvatores,Michael Schneeberger, Suyan Zhou

Save the Climate (Sauvons Le Climat)

To be published in “International Journal for Global Energy Issues”

Abstract

The reference framework MESSAGE devised by the « International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria » is one of the two frameworks reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as potentially able to limit the global surface temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius (RCPⁱ 2.6). To achieve this, it proposes the use of massive deployment of carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS), dealing with tens of billion tons of CO2. However, present knowledge of this process rests on a few experiments at the annual million tons level, with global storage capacity not yet established as being adequate.
The use of CCS is limited to 24 billion tons/y, based on the assumption of either a large-scale development of nuclear energy between 2060 and 2100 or else a severe contraction of energy supply. It includes three potential scenarios: « Supply » with a high energy consumption, « Efficiency » which implies the end of nuclear energy, paid for by a decrease in energy consumption of 45% with respect to the “Supply scenario”, and the intermediary « MIX » scenario. All three scenarios propose a high contribution of solar energy and biomass. In the “Supply” scenario 7000 GWeⁱⁱ nuclear power start operation between 2060 and 2100.

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i Representative Concentration Pathways
ii GWe

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