California thinkin'

Duncan Clark on the carbon footprint of nuclear war | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Almost 700m tonnes of CO2 would be released into the Earth's atmosphere by even the smallest nuclear conflict, according to a US study that compares the environmental costs of developing various power sources
...
The paper's author, Mark Z Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, calculated the emissions of such a conflict by totting up the burn rate and carbon content of the fabric of our cities. "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%. We approximate roughly the carbon content of all combustible material in a city as 40–60%."

But why would a Stanford engineer bother calculating such a thing? Given that the nuclear exchange would also kill up to 17 million people, who's going to be thinking about the impact on global warming?

The purpose of the paper is to compare the total human and environmental costs of a wide range of different power sources, from solar and wind to nuclear and biofuels. One of the side-effects of nuclear power, the report argues, is an increased risk of nuclear war: "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," Jacobson continues, "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 … 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."