Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Research Domain Sustainable Solutions, 14473 Potsdam, Germany.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Oct 16;109(42):16805-10. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1201264109. Epub 2012 Oct 1.
The events of March 2011 at the nuclear power complex in Fukushima, Japan, raised questions about the safe operation of nuclear power plants, with early retirement of existing nuclear power plants being debated in the policy arena and considered by regulators. Also, the future of building new nuclear power plants is highly uncertain. Should nuclear power policies become more restrictive, one potential option for climate change mitigation will be less available. However, a systematic analysis of nuclear power policies, including early retirement, has been missing in the climate change mitigation literature. We apply an energy economy model framework to derive scenarios and analyze the interactions and tradeoffs between these two policy fields. Our results indicate that early retirement of nuclear power plants leads to discounted cumulative global GDP losses of 0.07% by 2020. If, in addition, new nuclear investments are excluded, total losses will double. The effect of climate policies imposed by an intertemporal carbon budget on incremental costs of policies restricting nuclear power use is small. However, climate policies have much larger impacts than policies restricting the use of nuclear power. The carbon budget leads to cumulative discounted near term reductions of global GDP of 0.64% until 2020. Intertemporal flexibility of the carbon budget approach enables higher near-term emissions as a result of increased power generation from natural gas to fill the emerging gap in electricity supply, while still remaining within the overall carbon budget. Demand reductions and efficiency improvements are the second major response strategy.
2011 年 3 月日本福岛核动力厂的事件引发了人们对核电厂安全运行的质疑，核能政策领域正在讨论现有核电机组提前退役的问题，并受到监管机构的考虑。此外，新建核电厂的未来也高度不确定。如果核能政策变得更加严格，那么气候变化缓解的一个潜在选择将变得更加不可行。然而，气候变化缓解文献中缺乏对核能政策（包括提前退役）的系统分析。我们应用能源经济模型框架来推导出情景，并分析这两个政策领域之间的相互作用和权衡。我们的结果表明，到 2020 年，核电机组提前退役将导致全球 GDP 的贴现累计损失 0.07%。如果再加上排除新的核电投资，总损失将增加一倍。跨期碳预算对限制核电使用政策的增量成本施加的气候政策的影响较小。然而，气候政策的影响比限制核电使用的政策大得多。碳预算导致到 2020 年为止，全球 GDP 的贴现累计近期减少 0.64%。碳预算方法的跨期灵活性使得由于天然气发电增加以填补电力供应中的新兴缺口，从而导致近期排放量增加，同时仍在总体碳预算范围内。需求减少和效率提高是第二个主要应对策略。
