Fact of the day: the world needs roughly 14 terawatts of carbon-free power in the next 40 years to make a reasonable stab at containing greenhouse-gas warming.
Satisfying world energy demand would require building one nuclear plant a day until mid century.
That figure stems from two assumptions. First, global energy demand will double by mid century from today’s 14 terawatts (or 14 trillion watts).
Second, a reasonable goal will be to keep atmospheric CO2 at or below 550 parts per million compared with today’s 280 ppm.
Will nuclear power be able to shoulder the burden? Not likely. To satisfy projected demand, the world will need to build a gigawatt-sized nuclear plant each day between now and mid century, says Robert Armstrong, deputy director of MIT’s Energy Initiative.
Such a pace of construction is almost inconceivable. Only one country has the capacity to build a nuclear reactor and that is Japan. Unfortunately, production is sold out for the next nine years.
The solution to global warming may include nuclear but needs to look far beyond splitting the atom.
