Calculation of CO2 in Nuclear Power Plant Construction

If you are looking for some simple but effective calculations to answer such apparently complex question as:

-What is the CO2 pollution from nuclear construction and what is it’s significance? or
-How much CO2 is produced when making the 520,000 cubic meters of concrete and 67,000 tonnes steel needed to make in a 1GW nuclear power station?

Then an excellent place to start is Tim Jarvis’s blog notes. Calculation methods and data sources are clearly stated as are any order of magnitude approximations made.

I strongly recommend the interested reader to visit the above reference and many other posts on Tim's web-log.

Tim's approach naturally caught my attention as a metallurgist, involved in the energy intensive manufacturing of clean steels and special alloys, for many years. Processes involved are often by definition, of the more controllable, electric steelmaking type, whose heat source is totally independent of chemically produced heat, eg. from carbon combustion with oxygen (CO2)or other chemical or metallic additions. High duty high reliability applications would typically include high temperature (creep resistant = slow stretching or flow) corrosion resistant, high strength and toughness aeronautic and nuclear quality grades...

Therefore, I am particularly pleased to reference more widely, sources of CO2 pollution from steelmaking mostly from Tim’s site but also my own questioning leading to a short review from IISI “International Iron & Steel Institute's data.

References
1. Danish Technology Institute report on CO2 in concrete production.

2. Blue Scope Steel

3. Azom Materials suggests around 2 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of steel.

4. Tata Steel claims
between 1.2 and 1.9 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of steel, depending on the process.

5. The International Iron & Steel Institute (IISI), based in London is probably one of the most authoritative if not the most authoritative global reference for CO2 in crude steel.

Jarvis concludes, as his article title indicates that:
CO2 pollution from nuclear construction is irrelevant

He recognises and pin-points the many of the implications for energy sources and the urgency required if CO2 reduction is to be properly addressed.

"This ignores the pollution from getting the fuel and running the plant. Also remember the CO2 is largely produced up front, which is bad news for quick CO2 reduction, but even building 10 GW of capacity to replace the UK's ageing plants will only produce 3 million tonnes of CO2 during construction - less than 1% of UK CO2 pollution in one year."

Thanks Tim for an enlightening piece of work.

How to Wedge-a-War on CO2 in the Steel Industry

Firstly-before getting involved:

It is best to arm ones-self with some sound statistics of main CO2 producers. For steel, CO2 goes hand-in-hand with steel production. These figures together with the CO2 correction factor are extensively given and well presented by country, region, "continents or uniform blockes", by company and company rank Top to bottom, tables and graphs notably by the International Iron & Steel Institute (IISI), based in London.

Secondly: support strongly, the most advanced practices, often these are most rapidly innovated, if not invented in the advance countries of the European Union. Flatering improvements in energy efficiency and CO2 reduction have been reported compared to other industrial sectors. Globally such results are likely to be countered by huge production increases and relatively poor emissions control in developing countries cf. below. However the above graph does show that important progress can be made in the "raw materials" phase of car making, the latter being the main outlet for steel.

NB. The energy intensity for all common ironmaking and steelmaking opperations is given clearly and in detail in the the paper Energy Use and Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the Steel Sector (April 2001) [Pdf] in Key Developing Countries by Lynn Price, Dian Phylipsen, Ernst Worrell, of the Energy Analysis Dept.,Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory University of California. Surprisingly for countries with enormous emission problems (China and India) this paper shows a relatively low C02 emissions level due to steelmaking compared to overall CO2 emissions. Nevertheless both countries have coal based energy economies and therefore carbon intensive. Carbon intensity trends are closely related to energy intensity trends but are also dependent upon the fuel mix used by the iron and steel industry in each country. Figure 20, in Energy Use and Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the Steel Sector (April 2001) [Pdf] shows that South Africa, India and China have the highest carbon intensities from iron and steel production, while Brazil and Mexico have relatively low carbon intensities.