Nuclear 2.0: Why A Green Future Needs Nuclear Power

by Mark Lynas

In other words, we are losing the war on carbon precisely because we are winning the war on poverty.

Nuclear power’s singular environmental advantage can be summed up in the term ‘energy density’ – consider that a golf ball-sized lump of uranium,

weighing just 780 grammes, can deliver enough energy to cover all your lifetime use, including electricity, car driving, jet flights, food and manufactured goods – a total of 6.4 million kWh. To get the same energy output from coal would require 3,200 tonnes of black rock, a mass equivalent to 800 adult elephants and resulting in more than 11,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.[26] The volume of this pile of coal would be 4,000 cubic metres: you can imagine it as a cube 16 metres in height, depth and width, about the size of a large 5-story building.