Improving the nuclear energy sustainability by decreasing its environmental footprint. Guidelines from life cycle assessment simulations

This paper describes the anticipated long-term evolutions of nuclear fuel cycles. The main driver for such an evolution is the need for improving the sustainability of global energy systems. Indeed, sustainability is becoming the international reference approach to reconciling the different fields of analysis, i.e. the technical performance, economic viability, environmental preservation and societal acceptance. While our societies have to face the issue of finding new energy models which help to mitigate climate change, global approaches are mandatory to select the relevant improvements for the different energy systems, including nuclear energy. In a first step, this paper focuses on the specific environmental footprint of nuclear energy and its position with regards the other energy sources. From this situation, this paper depicts the potential improvement to be studied in order to improve the overall environmental footprint. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.