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France’s nuclear fleet gives it one of the world’s lowest-carbon electricity grids
(ourworldindata.org)
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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Technology
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Plus: Building nuclear power plants requires huge amounts of concrete. And making huge amounts of concrete requires extremely huge carbon emissions.
This is just a bad take. Your average nuclear power plant uses the least amount of construction materials per produced unit of electricity during its lifetime amongst the non-fossil options (nuclear fission, hydropower, solar and wind) - this wouldn't be meaningfully impacted by accounting for fissile material used either.
Furthermore, most of it is concrete which actually contributes to much less emissions per weight when produced compared to metals (steel, aluminium, copper) which wind & particularly solar use a lot of.
Thing is despite a single nuclear plant being big, it is the equivalent of thousands of wind turbines or millions of solar panels.
In the context of emissions per unit of electricity however, these materials become a vanishingly small factor for all non-fossil electricity producers compared to fossil fuel plants.
Source on the environmental impacts of electricity generation
E: Added source