If you love fudge, go to Paris. Not for the confectionary, but to listen to the nuclear boosters clustered there whose favorite pastime is to fudge the numbers. The American Nuclear Society is already pushing -- and citing from -- Nuclear for Climate, an initiative of the Center for Nuclear Science and Technology Information.
ANS is trumpeting the 30 countries which “are operating 438 nuclear reactors” and the “67 new nuclear plants under construction.” Except the 438 figure is conflated by counting all of Japan’s reactors as “operating”, even though only two have restarted since the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
There were 62 reactors “under construction” as of July 2015 but the more pertinent stat, as noted in the 2015 World Nuclear Industry Status Report, is that five of these have been “under construction” for more than 30 years.
The initiative even claims that “independent studies” show nuclear life-cycle emissions as equivalent to renewables, except the link goes straight to the NEI website, the industry’s trade group, which is anything but independent.
Despite desperate efforts to paint itself a winner, nuclear continues to decline. Between 1977 and 2015 a total of 92 of all nuclear construction sites were abandoned or suspended in 18 countries.