Nuclear powered

2012 World [civil] electricity generation by fuels (IEA, 2014)

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. The term includes nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion. While every form of nuclear energy has been found in nature, fission energy was frequently viewed as a complete product of human ingenuity, until the discovery of Natural nuclear fission reactors within the earth's geological record. Presently, the nuclear fission of elements in the actinide series of the periodic table produce the vast majority of nuclear energy in the direct service of humankind, with nuclear decay processes, primarily in the form of hot-springs/geothermal energy, and radioisotope thermoelectric generators, in niche uses making up the rest.

Fission-electricity 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 lower than renewable energy when the latter is taken as a single energy source. 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 CO₂eq/kWh which is the lowest out of all commercial baseload energy sources. This is contrasted with coal and fossil gas at 820 and 490 g CO₂ eq/kWh. From the beginning of fission-electric power station commercialization in the 1970s, nuclear power 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.