If you spot examples of nuclear green washing please log in and post links and ideas about how to deal with this problem.

Here’s a recent example.  Reuters recently posted this article on nuclear fuel reprocessing and tagged it as “Green Business”. Here is Reuter’s editorial and suggestions page.

Here’s Russell Lowe’s letter to Reuters:

Commercial nuclear energy production is not a green energy, and Green Business should not be linked to nuclear energy. The life cycle of the nuclear option has a very poor rating. See www.stormsmith.nl for the best life cycle analysis to-date.

Particularly, if you analyze the 20 steps of the fuel cycle, the amount of energy that goes into these steps comes very close to the energy output. As uranium ore quality goes from 3000 ppm in 1980 to 1500 ppm in 2009 to 400 ppm in 2040, the energy use to mine and mill will put nuclear energy into a negative net energy position, when considering just a few thousand years of waste management energy. And really, many thousand need to be figured into LCC.

Thank you,
Russell Lowes