It is a doomsday scenario in itself. Even the aftermath of a small nuclear war would release 700 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. A new paper in the journal Energy & Environmental Science says that even a small restrained nuclear exchange using just one-thousandth of the weaponry of an all-out nuclear war, would result in 690m tonnes of CO2 entering the atmosphere – that’s more than UK's annual total.

So if you think that the best rhetoric on an enemy country is a push of the nuclear button then take this fact into account. Oh yes, after the mushroom cloud settles down, there will be the soot to deal with – 313 million tonnes of it. That’s enough to envelope the region in a perpetual shroud. Drawing on the analogy of a volcano eruption, scientists say that the crock would stop the sunlight and lower temperatures but soon the CO2 would come through and cause warming.

Mark Z Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University who authored the paper calculated the impact from the burn rate of the materials that make up a normal city. The assessment says –

Materials have the following carbon contents: plastics, 38–92%; tyres and other rubbers, 59–91%; synthetic fibres, 63–86%; woody biomass, 41–45%; charcoal, 71%; asphalt, 80%; steel, 0.05–2%. The approximate carbon content of all combustible material in a city is nearly 40–60%.

The original objective of the paper was to compare the total human and environmental costs of a range of different power sources, from solar and wind to nuclear and biofuels. Unlike the other power sources though, the danger with nuclear power lies in its military avatar. As Mark Jacobson says,
“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."
The study has drawn its fair share of critics who have questioned the extrapolation of the data used. Critics point out to the lack of concrete data while formulating the conclusions.

Coming back to the original objective of the study, nuclear energy comes of poorly when compared with the cheaper alternatives like wind and solar energy. Nuclear plants have an opportunity cost i.e. the emissions that could have been curtailed by quicker setups during the period it takes to set up a nuclear plant. But it fares favourably when compared to bio-fuels.

As a study, it may have its drawbacks but it does underscores the point that a nuclear war would have far reaching environmental consequences and of course, human ones as well.

The paper can be read here.
Source: The Guardian

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