I'm combining your first two posts:
"I am in no way worried about a major nuclear war at this point. I am very worried about AGW. The news keeps getting worse and worse with little sign that anything substantive will be done.
By contrast, the most likely nuclear war scenario at this point is probably Pakistan-India, which would be a disaster make no mistake. But it pails in comparison to what AGW looks set to do to humanity."Please help me understand how you demonstrate the values you profess when you ignore the totality of the problem. This isn't an either global warming or nuclear power choice; so when you falsely try to overlay that paradigm over a reality where you have the problem below in addition to nuclear slowing the effort to address AGW because of suboptimal economics and build time, it is confusing.
4d. Effects of Nuclear Energy on Nuclear War and Terrorism Damage
Because the production of nuclear weapons material is occurring only in countries that have developed civilian nuclear energy programs, the risk of a limited nuclear exchange between countries or the detonation of a nuclear device by terrorists has increased due to the dissemination of nuclear energy facilities worldwide. As such, it is a valid exercise to estimate the potential number of immediate deaths and carbon emissions due to the burning of buildings and infrastructure associated with the proliferation of nuclear energy facilities and the resulting proliferation of nuclear weapons. The number of deaths and carbon emissions, though, must be multiplied by a probability range of an exchange or explosion occurring to estimate the overall risk of nuclear energy proliferation. Although concern at the time of an explosion will be the deaths and not carbon emissions, policy makers today must weigh all the potential future risks of mortality and carbon emissions when comparing energy sources.
Here, we detail the link between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons and estimate the emissions of nuclear explosions attributable to nuclear energy. The primary limitation to building a nuclear weapon is the availability of purified fissionable fuel (highly-enriched uranium or plutonium)68. Worldwide, nine countries have known nuclear weapons stockpiles (U.S., Russia, U.K., France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea). In addition, Iran is pursuing uranium enrichment, and 32 other countries have sufficient fissionable material to produce weapons. Among the 42 countries with fissionable material, 22 have facilities as part of their civilian nuclear energy program, either to produce highly-enriched uranium or to separate plutonium, and facilities in 13 countries are active68. Thus, the ability of states to produce nuclear weapons today follows directly from their ability to produce nuclear power. In fact, producing material for a weapon requires merely operating a civilian nuclear power plant together with a sophisticated plutonium separation facility. The Treaty of Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons has been signed by 190 countries. However, international treaties safeguard only about 1% of the world’s highly-enriched uranium and 35% of the world’s plutonium68. Currently, about 30,000 nuclear warheads exist worldwide, with 95% in the U.S. and Russia, but enough refined and unrefined material to produce another 100,000 weapons69.
The explosion of fifty 15-kt nuclear devices (a total of 1.5 MT, or 0.1% of the yields proposed for a full-scale nuclear war) during a limited nuclear exchange in megacities could burn 63-313 Tg of fuel, adding 1-5 Tg of soot to the atmosphere, much of it to the stratosphere, and killing 2.6-16.7 million people68. The soot emissions would cause significant short- and medium-term regional cooling70. Despite short-term cooling, the CO2 emissions would cause long-term warming, as they do with biomass burning62. The CO2 emissions from such a conflict are estimated here from the fuel burn rate and the carbon content of fuels. Materials have the following carbon contents: plastics, 38-92%; tires and other rubbers, 59-91%; synthetic fibers, 63-86%71; woody biomass, 41-45%; charcoal, 71%72; asphalt, 80%; steel, 0.05-2%. We approximate roughly the carbon content of all combustible material in a city as 40-60%. Applying these percentages to the fuel burn gives CO2 emissions during an exchange as 92-690 Tg-CO2. The annual electricity production due to nuclear energy in 2005 was 2768 TWh/yr. If one nuclear exchange as described above occurs over the next 30 years, the net carbon emissions due to nuclear weapons proliferation caused by the expansion of nuclear energy worldwide would be 1.1-4.1 g-CO2/kWh, where the energy generation assumed is the annual 2005 generation for nuclear power multiplied by the number of years being considered. This emission rate depends on the probability of a nuclear exchange over a given period and the strengths of nuclear devices used. Here, we bound the probability of the event occurring over 30 years as between 0 and 1 to give the range of possible emissions for one such event as 0 to 4.1 g-CO2/kWh. This emission rate is placed in context in Table 3.
Full article for download here:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/revsolglobwarmairpol.htmEnergy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c
Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy securityMark Z. Jacobson