United Nation’s Global Climate Change Talks 2000 (COP-6)

The world’s nuclear power industry is hoping that genuine public concern over global warming will translate into new atomic reactor orders for this beleaguered industry. In particular, the industry is seeking to take advantage of “Clean Development Mechanism” (CDM) and “Joint Implementation” (JI) credits under the international Kyoto Protocol agreement on global warming. Under these scenarios, polluting countries could receive greenhouse emission “credits” for building new nuclear reactors in other countries. In November of 2000, the “Conference of the Parties 6” (COP6) met in the Hague, Netherlands. On their agenda was a determination of what technologies should be eligible to receive these credits. NIRS attended this conference because we believe only genuinely clean technologies, such as renewable energy and energy efficiency should be eligible to obtain such credits. For many reasons, nuclear power is not the answer to global warming. Indeed, when one considers the entire nuclear fuel chain–as opposed to simply atomic reactor operations–nuclear power is a considerable generator of greenhouse gases. From July 16-27, 2001 Conference of the Parties 6.5 took place in Bonn, Germany. This Conference was a great success, where Nuclear Power was declared out of the Kyoto Protocol!