Full Title: Back to the Future: Advanced Nuclear Energy and the Battle Against Climate Change
Author(s): Josh Freed
Publisher(s): Brookings Institution
Publication Date: December 1, 2014
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nationsbased organization that is the leading international body for the assessment of climate risk, issued a desperate call for more nonemitting power sources. According to the IPCC, in order to mitigate climate change and meet growing energy demands, the world must aggressively expand its sources of renewable energy, and it must also build more than 400 new nuclear reactors in the next 20 years—a neardoubling of today’s global fleet of 435 reactors. However, in the wake of the tsunami that struck Japan’s Fukushima Daichi plant in 2011, some countries are newly fearful about the safety of LWRs. Germany, for example, vowed to shutter its entire nuclear fleet.