On this second day of COP22, the Nuclear for Climate team met a lot of observers, journalists and parties from Senegal, India, Mali, the USA, Poland, Burkina Faso, China, the Philippines, Malaysia, etc.
We had a lot of questions about Nuclear, Investment, Radiation, Risk, CO2 emission, waste management of people that wants to make comparisons with Hydro, Solar, Wind, Coal, Gas, …
How to set a nuclear program ? Is it possible for every country ? Who could help ?
We talked about IAEA and its supporting program to countries willing to develop a nuclear energy program. More information to be found here.
Don’t fight the wrong battle
There are people at COP22 saying that we should replace nuclear energy by solar and wind and energy efficiency. We tell them not to fight nuclear, which is a good tool regarding CO2 emission and air pollution. We went to the panel session : “1.5°C – Mobilising action and political will for a safer future” organised by: Climate Action Network – Europe (CAN Europe), Climate Action Network International (CAN International), CARE International, Climate Vulnerable Forum. Ulriikka Aarnio from CAN Europe said that if we want to stay below the 1.5°C increase that is necessary for some islands to have a chance not to disappear, we need to stop producing CO2 very quickly. Here is a graph made by Ulriikka showing the EU emission trajectory that is needed to get 50% chance to stay below 1.5°C:
As we can see, we need to reduce drastically the CO2 emissions. Nuclear is a low carbon emission same amount as Wind !
For instance, Germany has decided to quit nuclear and the effect regarding CO2 emissions is catastrophic. As we can see on this chart made by Robert Wilson, from the University of Strathclyde at Glasgow, Germany (80 millions people) is now the first European country in term of CO2 emissions regarding other comparable countries such as France (66 millions people) or UK (65 millions people) !
If you want to talk about Nuclear and climate change, meet us at booth 3B (area E of the blue zone) during COP22 in Marrakesh or send us an email: eileen.langegger@euronuclear.org / boris.lengoc@sfen.org / denis.janin@iync.org
