page_title: Nuclear power
section_title: Carbon emissions
hierarchical_section_title: Nuclear power / Environmental impact / Carbon emissions
caption_attribution_description: English: Emissions of selected electricity supply technologies (gCO2eq/kWh). Median values from Table A.III.2 of Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_annex-iii.pdf
context_page_description: Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions that release nuclear energy to generate heat, which most frequently is then used in steam turbines to produce electricity in a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced by nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium. Nuclear decay processes are used in niche applications such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Generating electricity from fusion power remains at the focus of international research.
  Civilian nuclear power supplied 2,563 terawatt hours of electricity in 2018, equivalent to about 10% of global electricity generation, and was the second largest low-carbon power source after hydroelectricity. As of December 2019, there are 443 civilian fission reactors in the world, with a combined electrical capacity of 395 gigawatt. There are also 56 nuclear power reactors under construction and 109 reactors planned, with a combined capacity of 60 GW and 120 GW, respectively.
context_section_description: Nuclear power is one of the leading low carbon power generation methods of producing electricity, and in terms of total life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy generated, has emission values comparable to or lower than renewable energy.
  A 2014 analysis of the carbon footprint literature by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that the embodied total life-cycle emission intensity of fission electricity has a median value of 12 g CO
  2eq/kWh, which is the lowest out of all commercial baseload energy sources.
  This is contrasted with coal and natural gas at 820 and 490 g CO
  2 eq/kWh.
  From the beginning of its commercialization in the 1970s, nuclear power has prevented the emission of about 64 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent that would have otherwise resulted from the burning of fossil fuels in thermal power stations.
caption: Life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of electricity supply technologies, median values calculated by IPCC[320]
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