Latest news with #TimGregory
Daily Mail
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Going Nuclear by Tim Gregory: Want to save the planet? GO NUCLEAR
Going Nuclear: How The Atom Will Save The World by Tim Gregory (Bodley Head £25, 384pp) Tim Gregory works in what he calls 'one of the most chemically exotic square miles on the planet'. He is a scientist at the UK's National Nuclear Laboratory at Sellafield. So, it is no surprise that his new book offers a deeply researched and mostly persuasive argument in favour of nuclear power and its benefits. If we want to renounce fossil fuels and clean up our energy systems, 'splitting atoms of uranium inside nuclear reactors is our best bet at reaching net zero by 2050'. Yet, as he acknowledges, profound suspicion of the nuclear industry is rooted in the public mind. And, in what he sees as an ironic contradiction, those people who are most concerned about climate change are the very ones who are least supportive of nuclear power. This anxiety was not always so widespread. In the 1950s, nuclear power was often seen as the future we should happily embrace. In Britain, Calder Hall, the country's first atomic power station, was opened by Queen Elizabeth II 'with pride'. The town of Workington became one of the first in the world where people's washing machines, record players and other electrical appliances were driven by nuclear electricity. It was not only the Queen who was enthused by the then new technology. Gregory tells the oddly charming story of Muriel Howorth, who became a staunch advocate of nuclear power at the age of 62 after reading a book she'd borrowed from her local library. She went on to found the Ladies' Atomic Energy Club and to write a pantomime called Isotopia, which included characters such as Isotope, Neutron and Atom Man. In 1950, it was staged in London with members of the Ladies' Atomic Energy Club playing all the roles. She had hopes of a performance at the Albert Hall but, sadly, this was never to be. A 21st-century Muriel Howorth seems unlikely to emerge. Nuclear power has lost the glamour it may have possessed in the 1950s. It is more likely today to elicit alarm and anxiety. Gregory puts much of contemporary worry about the nuclear industry down to what he calls 'radiophobia' – an irrational fear of radiation. Popular culture has played its part in warping society's perception of the subject. The idea of atomic bombs has become entwined with our notions of the nuclear industry. Gregory endeavours to get beyond the mushroom clouds of our imagination. As he points out, all kinds of unexpected objects are radioactive to some extent. Potassium-40 emits beta and gamma radiation. Bananas and potatoes both contain potassium, so are therefore radioactive. 'Biology,' he notes, 'unfolds against a background of radioactivity.' All of us spend our lives 'bathed in radiation'. The only way we could avoid it would be by adopting a highly impractical programme of not eating, drinking or even breathing. 'You can't have radiation-free anything,' Gregory writes. 'Background radiation is about as ubiquitous and as harmless as it gets.' What about the dangers of nuclear waste and the difficulties of disposing of it? Gregory argues that these are greatly exaggerated. The paraphernalia in his lab – gloves, test-tubes, biros – is all classified as nuclear waste because it comes from Sellafield. Most of it is 'far less radioactive than a banana'. 'Low-level' nuclear waste accounts for just one per cent of the radioactivity in all nuclear waste but 87 per cent of its volume. The most dangerous type of 'high-level' waste, by contrast, represents 0.1 per cent of the total volume of nuclear waste but contains 95 per cent of its radioactivity. All the high-level waste from the past 70 years of the nuclear industry would fit inside a medium-sized concert hall. Figures such as these may well be reassuring, but Gregory is on less sure ground when he turns to the major disasters that have struck the industry over the decades. Again he turns to statistics to argue that we should not be over-anxious. 'Nuclear's safety record is blotted by a small number of rare, high-visibility events,' he acknowledges, but it's 'about as safe as wind and solar, and it's tens or hundreds times safer than fossil fuels'. Air pollution from the latter kills as many people every six hours, Gregory states, as nuclear power has ever done. He acknowledges the seriousness of Chernobyl, which he describes unequivocally as 'the worst disaster in the history of nuclear power', but he argues that we should not overestimate its long-term effects. The accident at Chernobyl happened because of a combination of factors – an unusual design of reactor, operators who broke the rules, Soviet-era corruption – that is extremely unlikely to occur again. He also uses an array of statistics and scientific studies to show fears of ongoing health risks are exaggerated. A study from 2019 found that cancer rates in regions of Ukraine close to Chernobyl were no higher than the national average. Not everyone will buy Gregory's take on Chernobyl, but he's more convincing on the 2011 Fukushima disaster, where an earthquake triggered a tsunami that caused three nuclear units to explode. Twenty thousand people died due to the natural disasters but only one person died as a result of the radiation, and a UN scientific committee found no evidence that the radiation caused an increase in any type of cancer. Arguments over the dangers of nuclear power will continue. What seems inarguable is its potential. There is, Gregory writes, 'as much nuclear energy in a gram of uranium as there is chemical energy in more than a tonne of coal'. If you powered a lightbulb with a gram of coal, it would give you 15 minutes of light; a gram of uranium would light up the bulb for 30 years. As he bluntly states, 'Net zero is impossible without nuclear power.' Renewables such as wind and solar have important roles to play but alone they cannot possibly satisfy a society that needs on-demand electricity. And the demand is growing. Europe today generates a fifth of its electricity from nuclear. It's the biggest source of emissions-free electricity, bigger than solar and wind combined. Gregory reports on what he calls 'the flatpack furniture of the nuclear world' – small modular reactors that take up the space of 5.5 football pitches. He envisages a future in which every large town will have one of these smaller reactors and there will be several in every major city worldwide. 'Nuclear,' he writes, 'will become routine.' Gregory is passionate in his belief that nuclear power will solve the world's energy problems. Not all readers will be so evangelical but his book presents a strong, carefully argued case for his ideas.
Telegraph
15-06-2025
- Science
- Telegraph
The 32-year-old nuclear scientist busting the ‘Net Zero myth'
The splitting of the atom was supposed to bring about a new age of abundance. In the world of tomorrow, model families would live beside giant cooling towers in homes running on electricity 'too cheap to meter'. They would get around in cars powered by miniature nuclear reactors, not needing to stop and refuel for thousands of miles. Even the tedium of golf could be alleviated, somewhat, by balls implanted with radioactive material to make them easy to find with a Geiger counter when lost in the rough. Needless to say, this vision of the future never materialised. While progress was being made, a pair of disasters – Three Mile Island in the West and Chernobyl in the East – dealt a blow to nuclear's reputation as a safe source of power from which it has yet to fully recover. Humankind now finds itself struggling to end its dependence on fossil fuels. Governments are spending colossal sums to swap coal, oil and gas for wind and solar so they can achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, and progress has been slow. A renewed push for nuclear may be beginning, but many wonder whether net zero can be reached at all. It was this question that got the scientist and author Dr Tim Gregory thinking and which inspired his new book, Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World. Gregory's argument is simple: what we need is a total rethink of the path to net zero. We should embrace nuclear power and turn decarbonisation into the Apollo programme of the 21st century. 'Certainly, for the foreseeable future, nuclear power represents our best shot of sensibly achieving net zero and producing all of the electricity that we're going to need by 2050 when we're all in electric cars and using heat pumps,' he says from the driver's seat of his car as we float through the vales and hills of the Lake District towards Sellafield, where Gregory works as a chemist. His book is ordered with the care and precision you would expect from someone whose bread and butter are atoms and subatomic particles. Nuclear power's potential to change the world is enlivened by data and forward-looking policy ideas. Counter-arguments are pulled apart with rigour. But what comes through most strongly is Gregory's enthusiasm. The 32-year-old emits optimism like an exotic isotope emits gamma rays. 'That's one of my favourite things about being a scientist. It's a genuine, incredible source of optimism,' he says over a pea fritter and chips (Gregory is a vegetarian) in Seascale, a village just down the coast from Sellafield that became known as 'the brainiest town in Britain' when the scientists and engineers arrived to build Britain's first nuclear facilities. The tide is turning There are already signs the tide may be turning in favour of nuclear energy. Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, announced earlier this week that Britain would spend £14.2 billion on a new nuclear power station at Sizewell C, and Donald Trump, the US president, last month issued a flurry of executive orders aiming to quadruple nuclear energy capacity by 2050. Until recently, though, Gregory wasn't sure if net zero was possible. 'I was thinking fossil fuels are so deeply embedded in everything we do in society – they just produce too much energy and they're too convenient, they're too easy – that we're going to extract every last drop of oil, every pocket of gas, and every gram of coal, and burn it.' But researching his book turned a hunch into a conviction that nuclear power is the best option for reaching net zero. So what does he think needs to happen? More nuclear reactors must be built, of course. In Britain, just 10 nuclear reactors like the Olkiluoto-3 reactor recently inaugurated in Finland would eliminate fossil fuels from the grid. The whole of Europe, he states, would need only 170 similarly sized reactors to achieve the same result; the rest of the world, 1,500. An even grander scheme imagines a global fleet of thousands of reactors which together, Gregory calculates, could meet the world's energy demands for a thousand years. If that seems like a lot, it's because it is. 'That's the scale of the net zero challenge,' he writes. But we have, to an extent, done this before. Take France – after the oil crisis of the 1970s, the country resolved to go nuclear to protect itself from future shocks. Under the slogan, 'In France, we don't have oil, but we have ideas,' 56 reactors were built which, at their peak, supplied 70 per cent of its energy. 'They almost decarbonised their entire grid by accident before anyone cared about climate change,' says Gregory, holding up a chip for emphasis. 'There's a real lesson in that. It's actually possible. The science and technology is there already. We just need to get our act together and deploy it. We're already at about 30 per cent renewables in a lot of countries. What about 30 per cent renewables, 70 per cent nuclear? Then you've done it, and you can all talk about something else and just crack on.' Gregory was thrilled by Mr Miliband's Sizewell C announcement, which the Energy Secretary described as a new 'golden age' for the British nuclear industry. 'I'm delighted. It's not every day a new 3.2 gigawatt nuclear reactor is announced.' Yet Britain intends for nuclear power to contribute just a quarter of its electricity production by 2050. Gregory is not a betting man but, if he were, his money would be on France to be the first country to achieve net zero. Reassuring the general public Before we can begin building Gregory's fleet of reactors, some hurdles have to be cleared, not least the widespread safety concerns around nuclear power. A short walk from where we are sitting, nuclear waste from Sellafield is periodically discharged into the Irish Sea. You'd think it would be enough to deter even the hardiest wild swimmer, but Gregory is unfazed. 'They pipe radioactive waste offshore just over there,' he says, squinting up the beach towards the nuclear site. 'It's absolutely fine. I go swimming in there all the time in summer.' Sometimes pods of dolphins visit – and he hasn't seen any with three eyes. A chunk of Gregory's book is devoted to countering 'radiophobia' – the undue fear of radiation that has been stoked by nuclear weapons testing, disasters and popular culture. There was a forensic examination of the impact of the Chernobyl disaster, which occurred when a reactor exploded during a safety test. Gregory estimates that the true death toll – even including cancers caused by radiation exposure – 'likely falls in the region of a few hundred'. The Fukushima disaster, he notes, has only been linked to a single death, and at Three Mile Island, the worst nuclear accident in American history, 'nobody died, nobody was exposed to anything above background radiation in the surrounding population'. Yet the combined effect of these incidents on our appetite for nuclear power has been extreme. 'We built more nuclear reactors in Europe in the five years leading up to Chernobyl than we have since.' In the lab, Gregory handles minute samples of some of the most radioactive isotopes on the planet. He and his colleagues wear sensors that measure the doses they are absorbing. Gregory, a 'spreadsheet geek', keeps a running tally but says the amount he absorbs each year is negligible – about the same as you would get from a two-week holiday in Cornwall, where high levels of radon gas in the rocks mean annual radiation exposure is more than three times the UK average. He doesn't want to downplay the threat to health ionising radiation can pose, but his work affords him a different perspective. 'The people who work with radiation every day are the people who are least afraid of it,' he says. 'We're all living in radiation anyway, all the time. There's no escaping it.' We pause to acknowledge the glare of the sun. Gregory believes we have no need to worry about nuclear power. But one concern he does not address in the book is the fear that nuclear power plants could become targets for terrorists or a hostile state – as we have seen in Ukraine, where Russia has held the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant hostage. His hypothetical nuclear world is persuasive but exists in controlled, laboratory conditions. 'Everything comes with a risk,' he says. 'The trick is to balance that risk with maximum trade-off, and I would also argue that with more energy, the world would become more peaceful.' Air pollution – a problem that could be mitigated significantly by an expansion of nuclear power – kills more people every hour than have ever died in nuclear accidents, he notes. 'The sight of those Chernobyl liquidators in their respirators and their lead aprons is so much more harrowing than a slightly smoggy city, but actually air pollution is not just a little bit worse, it's orders of magnitude worse.' Concerns around the storage of nuclear waste are similarly misplaced, he says. Long-lived waste that takes hundreds of thousands of years to lose its radioactive potency could be used as fuel for breeder reactors, which actually generate more fissile material than they consume. Building a network of these would leave us mainly with waste that needs to be stored for much shorter periods – think hundreds of years. Much of what we think of as waste is actually extremely useful, finding its way into cutting-edge medical treatments like targeted alpha therapy, which uses a short-lived isotope of lead to destroy cancer cells without harming healthy tissue. Britain, he is keen to point out, holds the world's largest civil stockpile of plutonium. One hundred and forty one tonnes of the stuff lies in a secure facility somewhere in Sellafield. If recycled, it could power the two new reactors at Hinkley Point C well into the 22nd century. But in January the government decided it would dispose of the stockpile by burying it deep underground. Learning from Germany's mistakes And what of global uranium supplies? By going nuclear, are we not simply swapping fossil fuel for a geological alternative? A calculation, which Gregory describes self-effacingly as having been done on the back of an envelope, suggests known reserves of uranium, thorium and recyclable fuel could provide power for 900 years. The 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium dissolved in the world's oceans would do for the next quarter of a million. 'It's a resource like any other – if you can't grow it, you have to dig for it,' he says. 'But there's plenty there to tide us over until we get fusion working. And it's actually quite geographically distributed around the world – it's not like any one country or small group of countries has a monopoly on it, like with oil.' But what of the cost? Germany's Energiewende – its transition away from nuclear and fossil fuels to renewables, which began at the turn of the millennium but accelerated after Fukushima – provides the perfect counterpoint. Nuclear, argues Gregory, provides much better value for money than any of its rivals. For the €500 billion Germany spent on its 'failed energy transformation', Gregory writes, it could have had 40 reactors like the one built in Finland. 'With that much electricity, plus the nuclear it switched off since 2000, Germany could have entirely decarbonised its electricity supply, eliminated the need for unreliable wind turbines and solar panels, electrified all 49 million of its cars, and still have spare electricity to generate 1.7 million tonnes of green hydrogen every year.' With large-scale infrastructure projects, Gregory concedes that there is a problem. 'We do seem to have a chronic inability to build large pieces of infrastructure,' he laments. 'It's not just the UK, it's the West in general, and it affects everything from high-speed rail networks to new hospitals to new housing estates, even potholes. There are lots of them around here, as you can imagine, with all the rain that we get.' Again though, we have done this before. Calder Hall, the world's first full-scale nuclear power station, opened in what is now Sellafield in 1956. Queen Elizabeth II threw the switch to connect it to the grid. 'We used to be world leaders at building nuclear power stations' We're back in the car and Sellafield is spreading out in the valley before us. A sign warning against the flying of drones flashes by as we come to a halt on a road named after John Dalton, the Cumbrian-born scientist who popularised the idea that the world was made from atoms. (The ancient Greeks got close but it was a 'lucky guess', says Gregory.) 'In the UK, we used to be world leaders at building nuclear power stations, not just quickly but en masse. The median build time in Europe back in the 1970s and 1980s was about six years, which is about what it is today in China and South Korea,' he says, pointing to the stacks where British scientists took the first steps into the Atomic Age. 'There is a doom and gloom in society, and people are demoralised,' says Gregory. 'I don't want to diminish the very real problems that a lot of people face and the big challenges that the UK faces and the world faces, but we are actually capable of doing some really cool stuff when we put our minds to it.' That's where his Apollo programme analogy comes in. 'A massive, concerted effort on the nuclear power front would solve a lot of our problems. And it's totally achievable.' When he's not in the lab, Gregory is often out promoting nuclear power's green credentials, bringing him into contact with environmentalist groups who are at best ambivalent towards it. Many, like Greenpeace, have their roots in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and are implacably opposed to it, seeing it as linked with atomic weapons, though as Gregory says, 'you can have one without the other'. He recalled a recent encounter with an eco activist. 'I've read a lot of Greenpeace literature, a lot of Friends of the Earth literature – I haven't just put myself into an echo chamber. But I came away from the conversation with this guy really disappointed by how weak the arguments were. They're either based on things that aren't true, or gut feelings, and energy policy is not something that should be dictated by gut feeling.' Despite this, Gregory has a surprising amount in common with the naysayers of nuclear power. Raised in Dewsbury by a single mother, he was 'grabbed' by a passion for science at a young age. Bird-watching books, mushroom-spotting guides and encyclopaedias, provided by his mother, fuelled a love of the natural world. 'I've always had a rock collection and a fossil collection. I had a miniature museum in my bedroom and posters of geological timelines and all the rest of it,' he says. 'I used to get the mickey taken out of me at school for loving science and that kind of thing – I used to get called Nasa boy.' Today, he loves nothing more than walking in the fells that surround his home. 'There's a certain awe you get from being out in the mountains,' he admits. While some find it tough to adapt to the relative isolation of this corner of west Cumbria, Gregory revels in the fact that he is 100 miles from the nearest Pret. He met his wife Amy in a laboratory at Sellafield, and the pair married in a pub having bonded over a shared love of ale. Beer-making, he says, 'is the best kind of chemistry, after all'. He rejects the popular view that achieving carbon neutrality means sacrificing quality of life. For example, 'I hate paper straws. They're an example of bad technology. They make me really resentful, actually,' he says. Really good green technology, he says, should instead be about replacing something with an alternative that is not only more environmentally friendly, but is actually better – like the LED light bulb. 'That's exactly the kind of technology that we should be implementing more of. It's better than what it replaces in its function, and it's cheaper and it's better for the environment. It's perfect. Who can argue with that?' He is similarly irked by 'greenwashing' and uses a brief section of Going Nuclear to interrogate Greta Thunberg's fabled transatlantic yacht voyage to the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019. While she may not have racked up any air miles getting there, the same cannot be said for a crew of five who had to fly to New York to retrieve the vessel and sail it back to Sweden. 'Of all the things in my book that might get me cancelled, the opening to that chapter might be one,' Gregory says. Ultimately though, he feels he is mostly on the same page as the environmentalists, and indeed sees himself as one, of a sort. 'The aims of the environmental movement are really good, and I think most people would agree with them. We all want a cleaner world that's more sustainable – exactly the kind of view that we're enjoying now,' he says, pointing out Blencathra as it looms up out of the landscape. 'I really do think the penny is dropping that renewables on their own are just not going to do it, but with nuclear, it's like both sides of the debate win – everybody gets what they want.' So what does Gregory's vision of the future look like? Regrettably, the nuclear-powered car doesn't come into it, though he expects every town and city will have one or more of the emerging breed of small modular reactors providing their power, alongside solar panels and wind turbines. In fact, the nuclear city of the future may not be unfamiliar to us today. 'It doesn't have to be fundamentally different, that's the point. Nuclear power is already Europe's biggest source of emissions-free energy by quite a long way, and that's really surprising, and the fact that it's surprising is really telling, because nobody notices.' The Energy Coast, as this part of west Cumbria is known, provides a glimpse of such a future. Locals are big supporters of the nuclear industry and Gregory reckons they would be thrilled if a new reactor opened and Sellafield began producing power again. The same cannot be said, however, of a planned solar farm down the road. 'Everybody's kicking off about it. Nuclear is the thing around here – people are really proud of it.' Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World, by Tim Gregory, is published on 12 June (Bodley Head, £25)
Channel 4
10-06-2025
- Science
- Channel 4
Debate: should the UK be betting big on nuclear energy?
We're joined by Tim Gregory, a nuclear chemist and author of 'Going Nuclear; How the Atom Will Save the World', and Alison Downes, Executive Director of Stop Sizewell C.
Telegraph
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Forget Greta Thunberg's greenwashing – this is the energy of the future
In 2019, Greta Thunberg travelled to the UN Climate Action Summit in New York by boat. Eschewing the evil aeroplane, she crossed the Atlantic aboard a 'zero-emissions yacht' festooned with solar panels; it took her a fortnight. Very virtuous: but the yacht's skipper then flew home to Europe, and another crew of five flew from Europe to New York to sail the boat back. 'In the end,' Tim Gregory remarks in Going Nuclear, 'Thunberg's voyage produced more emissions than if she and her father had just taken return transatlantic flights.' Nonetheless, Thunberg's self-congratulatory stunt has been credited with strengthening the Nordic movement called 'Flight Shame' (Flygskam), which tries to make people feel bad about flying. Gregory's target in this book, instead, is what you might call 'nuclear shame'. We have been conditioned, he laments, to think that radioactivity is terrifying, and that nuclear power stations are absurdly expensive and liable to blow up. As a physicist who works at the National Nuclear Laboratory in Sellafield, Gregory knows better. Assuming one agrees with the ambition to reduce carbon emissions to 'net zero' by 2050, he argues, more nuclear power is the only sensible way to do it. Wind and solar power are great but intermittent. 'Biomass' is just a sciencey-sounding label for burning wood and pretending its carbon emissions don't count. We can pass over rapidly the 'de-growth' movement of radical economists who fantasise about drastically reducing everyone's standard of living. At some level, the environmentalist disdain for nuclear power is a symptom of their hatred and distrust of technology and human civilisation itself. Many sacred cows of the green zealot are thus energetically slaughtered. A nuclear power station, Gregory accepts, is not 'emissions-free' when you count mining the uranium and building the plant, but its lifetime emissions per watt of energy generated are comparable to those of wind and solar. The confirmed death tolls of all nuclear accidents are remarkably small in comparison to the far greater numbers killed by pollution from coal. And to neglect nuclear generation in favour of focusing on 'renewables' – as Germany notoriously did after the Fukushima accident, shutting down all its reactors – actually condemns you to using more fossil fuels (in this case, Russian gas) in order to provide baseload power. But nuclear, critics say, takes too long to build. It needn't, Gregory retorts: the median time of a new build globally is only 6.4 years. The delays and cost overruns of Hinkley Point C admittedly 'make nuclear power look farcical', but just look at other bureaucratic farces such as HS2. Meanwhile, between 2019 and 2024, the UAE built a fleet of nuclear reactors that now powers a quarter of the country. What about nuclear waste? Well, the 'low-level' kind, which makes up 87 per cent of the total, includes things like gloves and lab equipment, most of which is 'far less radioactive than a banana'. The world's stockpile of the most dangerous 'high-level' radioactive waste ever generated would fit in a cube 33 metres across. You could re-use much of it as fuel in other reactors, or bury it deep underground, like the Finns do. This book is a highly engaging and lucid primer on nuclear technology. Gregory also describes some fascinating advances in nuclear medicine (better-targeted radiotherapy) and 'atomic gardening' (using radiation to find new crop strains). And he celebrates the nuclear batteries that power our exploration of the universe via space probes such as Voyager and the Mars rovers. Going Nuclear is also, in some ways, a lament for a retro sci-fi future. Just as we never got flying cars, we never got electricity that was, as early nuclear enthusiasts notoriously promised, 'too cheap to meter'; nor did we get nuclear reactors on the Moon. (Gregory is winningly fond of 'vintage technology that never saw its full potential'). But, Gregory argues, we still could have these things, and the second-best time to start is now. The scolding doominess of much climate activism, he suggests, is silly and counterproductive: 'Informed optimism is far superior.' Nuclear energy was the future once; maybe it will be again.
The Guardian
02-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Going Nuclear by Tim Gregory review – a boosterish case for atomic energy
There is something biblical about the fraternal relationship between the atomic bomb and the nuclear reactor. Both involve bombarding uranium-235 atoms with neutrons to produce a chain reaction via nuclear fission. Both were made possible in the same instant, at 3.25pm on 2 December 1942, when the Manhattan Project's Enrico Fermi orchestrated the first human-made chain reaction in the squash court of the University of Chicago. 'The flame of nuclear fission brought us to the forked road of promise and peril,' writes Tim Gregory. The bomb came first, of course, but atomic dread coexisted with tremendous optimism about what President Eisenhower dubbed 'atoms for peace': the potential of controlled fission to generate limitless energy. As David Lilienthal of the US Atomic Energy Commission observed, atom-splitting thus inspired a pseudo-religious binary: 'It would either destroy us all or it would bring about the millennium.' Nuclear optimism was shattered by the 1986 Chornobyl disaster but, as the subtitle of his book advertises, Gregory is determined to bring it back. A nuclear chemist at Sellafield, where the Queen opened the world's first commercial nuclear reactor in 1956, he's a cheerleader for Team Millennium. Writing in a Promethean spirit of 'rational and daring optimism', this self-proclaimed 'nuclear environmentalist' believes nuclear energy is the only viable route to net zero by 2050. 'The nucleus could power the world securely, reliably, affordably, and – crucially – sustainably,' he declares. Gregory is an excellent popular science writer: clear as a bell and gently humorous. If you want to understand the workings of fission or radioactivity, he's your man. But he is also an evangelical pitchman whose chapters on the atom's myriad wonders can read rather like high-end sales brochures. Radiation? Not a problem! Less dangerous, in fact, than radiophobia, 'the irrational fear of radiation'. High-level nuclear waste? It can be buried in impregnable catacombs like Finland's state-of-the-art Onkalo or, better yet, recycled through breeder reactors. Gregory wants the reader to learn to stop worrying and love the reactor. Of course, there is a radioactive elephant in the room, which Gregory eventually confronts in the chapter We Need to Talk About Chernobyl. Like Three Mile Island (1979) and Fukushima (2011), the Soviet disaster caused reactor construction to crash. Europe built more reactors in the five years before Chornobyl than it has in the four decades since. The Fukushima meltdown spooked Germany into dismantling its entire nuclear programme. Whereas France, which has one-eighth of the planet's 441 active reactors, currently generates two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear, Germany produces none, cancelling out its gains from renewables and making it painfully reliant on Russian gas. Gregory argues that the construction of reactors like Hinkley Point C in Somerset runs behind schedule and over budget because we've lost the habit, even as China and South Korea streak ahead. To Gregory, all this is a tragic case of radiophobia. Only around 50 fatalities have been directly attributed to radiation from Chornobyl, while the official death tolls for Fukushima and Three Mile Island are one and zero respectively. Roll them all together and the same number of people are lost roughly every three minutes to air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels. No doubt, the kneejerk rejection of nuclear energy can be ignorant bordering on superstitious, but safety concerns demand more space and consideration. Oddly, Gregory doesn't mention Serhii Plokhy's 2022 book Atoms and Ashes, which explains how the Fukushima disaster could have been much worse if not for the courage and judgment of a few key officials. More offputtingly, he attacks renewable energy with roughly the same arguments used by rightwing critics of net zero, warning of 'energy scarcity, industrial wind-down, and food insecurity' if we choose wind and sun over good old uranium-235. But surely it is not a zero-sum game? After a while, Gregory's relentless boosterism begins to lose its persuasive power and he sounds rather like the blithely confident scientist in the first act of a disaster movie. Even though I'm personally convinced that anybody focused on the climate emergency would be foolish to dismiss nuclear out of hand, I suspect that sceptics may require an argument that sounds a little less like 'Calm down, dear.' Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World by Tim Gregory is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
