Climate Change, Nuclear Power, and Nuclear Proliferation: Magnitude Matters

Abstract

Integrated energy, environment, and economics modeling suggests that worldwide electrical energy use will increase to ∼12 TWe in 2100. Due to limitations of other low-carbon energy sources, nuclear power may be required to provide ∼30% of world electrical energy by 2100. Calculations of the associated stocks and flows of uranium, plutonium, and minor actinides indicate that the proliferation risks at mid-century, using current light-water reactor technology, are daunting. There are institutional arrangements that may be able to provide an acceptable level of risk mitigation, but they will be difficult to implement. If a transition is begun to fast-spectrum reactors at mid-century, the global nuclear proliferation risks become much greater by 2100, and more resistant to mitigation. Fusion energy, if successfully demonstrated to be economically competitive, would provide a source of nuclear power with much lower proliferation risks than fission.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Larry Grisham and Greg Hammett for their contributions to the discussion of carbon sequestration and intermittent renewable energy sources, Valentina Bosetti for help in accessing the EMF 22 database, Alex Glaser for insights into the LWR fuel cycle and helpful comments, and Steven Piet for help finding key references on fast reactor parameters, and for very useful discussions. He would like to thank M.V. Ramana for helpful discussions, and Frank von Hippel for bringing up the issue of plutonium “mines” vs. plutonium “rivers” that motivated this analysis. This work was supported by U.S. Department of Energy Contract # DE-AC02-09CH11.