Can we afford to be afraid of nuclear power?

The Guardian

2 days ago

Money can buy comfort, but energy makes comfort possible in the first place. Energy is the great enabler of the modern world. It connects the globe by moving people and hauling goods. It loosens the grip of the weather by warming our homes in winter and cooling them in summer. It forges the steel that raises our cities and synthesises the fertilisers that keep half the world's population from starvation. It increasingly empowers us by electrifying the technologies we rely on daily.
It is also the great enabler of socioeconomic development. Monetary wealth and energy abundance move in lockstep: plot a graph of GDP per capita against energy consumption per capita, and you'll draw a straight line. Low-energy, high-income nations do not exist. Prosperity and energy are inseparable; you cannot have one without the other.
Sure, GDP per capita isn't a perfect measure of socioeconomic development. It says nothing about how evenly that wealth is distributed, for instance. But it remains an excellent barometer, and one that all nations actively strive to raise, particularly less wealthy ones.
Today, 700 million people live in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $2.15 per day). They won't climb out of it without access to more energy. Making as much energy as possible available to as many people as possible ought to be a defining goal of the 21st century.
But there is an elephant in the room: the climate emergency. Our energy supply is responsible for three-quarters of our global greenhouse gas emissions. Plot a second graph, this time of carbon emissions per capita against energy consumption per capita: you'll draw another straight line. So, how do we promote energy abundance and the prosperity it enables without sacrificing the natural environment?
The answer is not to use less energy. Only a handful of countries – the UK, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and the USA, for example – have managed to decouple GDP from energy. They've grown richer over the past few decades, even though their energy consumption per capita has flatlined or even declined. But these countries are outliers: rich, highly developed economies with infrastructure already in place. For the vast majority, the link between energy and prosperity remains unbroken. Denying the developing world access to abundant energy would be a profound moral failure, not to mention an act of breathtaking hypocrisy. The answer is not less energy, but cleaner energy, and more of it.
Wind and solar power are often offered as the solutions. But their power is intermittent, energy industry jargon for 'unreliable'. They're fundamentally constrained by meteorology and celestial mechanics: wind turbines falter on still days, and solar panels don't work on the side of the Earth facing away from the sun (colloquially called 'night-time'). I would love to live in a world where wind and solar alone could replace fossil fuels, but there's no beating the laws of physics.
Elaborate backup systems won't cut it, either. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity – which represents 95% of the world's electricity backup capacity – and batteries discharge in minutes and hours. Yet wind and solar falter for days and weeks at a time. To replace fossil fuels and support renewables, we need something that's always on, potent and, crucially, emissions-free.
Nuclear reactors meet these ideals. They're dispatchable, industry parlance for reliable. A single one generates enough electricity to power the lives of 2 million average Europeans, even after accounting for downtime and maintenance. And they don't emit carbon dioxide.
'But doesn't nuclear take too long to build?!' Not necessarily. Between 1973 and 1999 France built 56 nuclear reactors with a median construction time of just six years, cutting the fossil fuel share of electricity in its grid from 65% to less than 10%. (Incidentally, France's GDP per capita rose by 58% over the same period.)
It's true that sluggish build times torment the west today. Flamanville 3, France's first and only reactor of the 21st century so far, was supposed to take five years to build but ended up taking 17. Hinkley Point C – the UK's first since 1995 – is still a construction site seven years after breaking ground; the British government recently announced another power station – Sizewell C – will be online by the mid-2030s, but many fear the actual completion date will recede quickly into the future. Across Europe, the median build time since the year 2000 has dragged out to almost a decade. But it's not a problem with nuclear power per se; it's a symptom of the west's chronic inability to deliver large pieces of infrastructure, an ailment that affects everything from laying high-speed railway lines, to building new housing estates, to filling in potholes.
By contrast, rapid build times remain the norm in other parts of the world. China's median build-time since 2000 is five years and 10 months; South Korea's is six. The delays experienced by the west are regulatory and managerial failures, not technological ones.
There's also a perception that nuclear power is dangerous, yet the data show it's as safe as wind and solar. People believe that it's expensive, yet the International Energy Agency finds it to be 'the least cost option for low-carbon generation'. Perhaps it's bad for the environment? Well, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe concludes it has the lightest ecological burden of any power source. And how on earth do you solve the problem of nuclear waste? Finland – with a grid that's 40% nuclear – has a working geological storage solution.
In fact, nuclear power's biggest obstacle is its terrible PR. It's the bogeyman of the energy world, but like all bogeymen, the reality is rather different. It's a tragedy that we've been splitting atoms in nuclear power stations for longer than we've known we were causing the climate to change.
Solving the energy problem solves a tangle of others: economic, humanitarian and environmental. I envisage a future where nuclear reactors – complemented by wind turbines and solar panels – power the world. A future where clean, constant and plentiful energy awaits, and where prosperity doesn't cost the earth.
Tim Gregory is a nuclear chemist at the UK National Nuclear Laboratory and author of Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World (Bodley Head).
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Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker (Penguin, £14.99)
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