The Greatest Impediment to Solving the Climate Crisis is our Collective Stigma of Nuclear Energy: Nuclear Energy Needs A Rebrand

Reframing The Climate Crisis

It is clear that climate change poses an existential threat to humanity. This juncture could have been avoided, although not for the reasons you may think. Our biggest downfall was the collective rallying behind the view that, in order to solve the climate crisis, we need to limit human consumption and force government intervention. Morally, this makes sense to us; humans are collectively responsible for the carbonisation of our atmosphere, therefore it follows that we should all be part of the solution. While well intentioned, reducing human consumption is as illogical as asking everyone in the world to restrict their caloric intake¹ without admitting that most diets fail.

Arguably, the purpose of every living organism on this planet is to consume energy, and life is merely the inevitable consequence of thermodynamics.² Placing the onus on every person, business and government turns almost everyone into a climate denier. It leads to cognitive dissonance and moral licensing, creating carbon cheat days rather than substantive changes. We placate ourselves by going vegan, while flying back and forth to Spain every summer. We have children even though we know that humans are the greatest contributors to global warming. We publicly condemn climate change deniers, while failing to recognise our own denials. Some sacrifices are too great for us to make, even in the name of saving our planet. Until there is a dramatically cheaper alternative to fossil fuels that can outcompete on economic terms, people will continue to summer in Majorca and pay Virgin airlines an extra $50 to “go-green” and offset their climate guilt. It’s time to rethink our approach and frame the solution in terms of abundance rather than efficiency.

The point of failure in this low-carbon diet comes down to the age-old “tragedy of the commons” problem: sharing the responsibility for climate change ultimately means that no one takes full responsibility, which applies as much to individuals as it does to countries. There is ample evidence that the last 20+ years of attempting to reduce human consumption and becoming more efficient has not worked. We have poured $2.6 trillion dollars³ into renewables since 2010, yet we are burning 50% more fossil fuels than we did at the beginning of the millennium.⁴ It is clear that consumption of energy far outpaces the supply of renewables. Despite this evidence, a large proportion of the world continues to believe that the way to solve climate change is to entrust humanity with the task of collectively reducing consumption of our own volition. Our future therefore hangs on our erroneous belief that humans are rational and capable of sacrifice for the common good; this is the same humanity in which more people die from diseases relating to overeating than malnourishment.⁵

The issue is that we have conflated science with social meaning. We talk about climate change as a trade-off between generations and a series of sacrifices required both by individuals and nations. The fact is that energy consumption is fundamental to all human pursuits. We cannot simply maintain or sustain it, we must make it abundant. By accepting this, we are liberated from the shackles of deeming climate change a moral problem, and with this liberation comes opportunity.

By conflating science with social meaning, we also impede real solutions to these social inequalities. We pit capitalism against human progress, which is fundamentally flawed. Human progress itself can be chronicled by our use of energy⁶ and, correspondingly, a lack of human progress can be viewed as a function of the cost of energy. Many inequalities, such as access to clean water, sanitation, food and shelter, could be significantly alleviated by access to dramatically cheaper forms of energy. The sad reality is that energy is fairly fungible, meaning that a family living in France pays relatively the same amount per kilowatt hour for their energy consumption as a family in Uganda. Energy is not yet cheap enough to be affordable for everyone. Over the course of a year, the French family will use 100 times the amount of energy as the Ugandan family, without much of a dent in their budget. Much of what wealthier countries deem to be necessities are considered luxuries for those in the developing world. Limiting consumption limits progress; no map articulates this stark social inequality as clearly as a satellite picture of the world at night.

Essentially, we have set ourselves the wrong climate goal. Our global target is to ‘limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels’.⁷ This articulation of the goal is problematic for a number of fundamental reasons. Temperature is a lagging indicator not a leading indicator; it is not a goal, it is a result. There are a host of factors that affect temperature change, all of which are up for a significant amount of debate. It is therefore near impossible to model behavioural change using lagging indicators; anybody who has tried their hand at goal setting should find this global goal comical if it wasn’t so depressing. Moreover, the target doesn’t account for the fact that every signatory country to the Paris Agreement is itself a market economy; it is easy to sign the agreement, but near impossible to coordinate and accomplish. Reducing consumption reduces demand, which in turn lowers the price of fossil fuels, meaning fossil fuels become more affordable to other purchasers. This makes it easy to rationalise why we weren’t successful at achieving our targets. As long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, we will burn them. Our goal then, should be to reduce the cost of energy consumption to well under the cost of fossil fuel extraction. Although by no means perfect, market forces could be used to accelerate these effects.⁸

By 2050, we are projected to have 9.7 billion people living on earth⁹, each of whom will have a wide spectrum of needs and wants that will increase over time. With our current technological trajectory, our 2050 electricity needs will far outstrip those of today.¹⁰ It is likely these needs will also exceed our expectations — consider how cloud computing and blockchain energy consumption have surprised us. So the questions we need to be asking are: How do we dramatically reduce the cost , both financially and environmentally, of energy? How do we make clean energy abundant so that we are playing in step with the laws of both physics and nature rather than working against them? And how, most crucially in the short term, can we get to the point when it is no longer profitable to extract fossils to fuel our homes?

Renewables Are Not Enough

Let me start by saying I am not advocating limiting investment in renewables. They have an important part to play in reducing our carbon footprint; however, we are at a precipice and renewables are not enough to avoid the impending climate crisis. There is a significant amount of evidence to support this conclusion. To put this into perspective, even if all new growth in energy consumption comes from carbon-free sources, we would need to displace the equivalent of 11,000 megatons of oil in roughly 11,000 days to be carbon neutral by 2050.¹¹ This is the equivalent of building the largest wind farm in the world every day, for the next 30 years.¹² Furthermore, the longer we take to solve this problem, the more extreme our response will need to be. This concept is referred to as non-linear tipping points. While we wait, temperatures continue to rise, which results in unpredictable climates. This further inhibits our well intentioned goals of implementing weather dependent renewables such as wind and solar power.

Perhaps the clearest way to illustrate the fact that renewables alone are not the solution is through a tale of two nations, France and Germany, who employed dramatically different decarbonization strategies. Precipitated by the Fukoshima disaster, there was a strong revival of the anti-nuclear movement in Germany, which led officials to legislate for the decommissioning of the country’s nuclear reactors. As a result, Germany chose to phase out its nuclear plants in favour of renewables such as wind and solar. Despite Germany’s greater per capita investment¹³ into renewables between the years 2011–2017, emissions in Germany have increased by approximately 5% per year (36 million tons of C02). France, on the other hand, continued to invest in both nuclear and hydroelectric energy. By 2019, the cost of electricity in France was less than half of that in Germany, and their carbon footprint was 10 times less than their European neighbor.¹⁴ In order to conceptualise this paradox, we must understand the reasons why renewables are not the silver bullets we hoped they would be, and why they are more expensive than we are led to believe.

By their very nature, solar and wind are intermittent, energy-diffuse and surface area-intense. These fundamental constraints meant that Germany could only construct solar and wind farms in areas where there was sufficient sun, wind and space. This resulted in the need for new infrastructure to connect these far-flung energy farms with users, which translated to a 50% increase in energy prices for German consumers; despite the dramatic decline in the cost of solar panels and wind turbines during the same period, the cost of energy still increased. With nuclear off the table and because Germany didn’t have the right conditions to build enough hydro plants, dozens of new natural gas power plants — the cheapest alternative — were built to offset the inherent unreliability and intermittency of the renewable energy sources, thereby increasing the country’s carbon output.

These intermittency issues haven’t prevented advocates of renewables from claiming that the future is a combination of renewables, batteries and other energy storage technologies.There have been significant advancements and cost reductions in such technologies. However, batteries are fundamentally limited by their elements, and are subject to market and geopolitical forces. China, for instance, has a near monopoly on known rare earth metal repositories critical to the manufacture of batteries. Even if we do not consider China to be a threat, as with any constraint, there must also be a trade-off. Transportation, by its mobile nature, requires a storage solution in order to decarbonise. As the components that make up batteries are a finite resource, there is a strong argument that we should be allocating these resources to decarbonising transportation rather than the electricity grid.

The tale of two countries now takes a turn for the worse. Despite the evidence, France succumbed to pressure from Germany and began denuclearizing their energy mix in 2019. As of February 2021, nuclear makes up 57% of their energy mix, which is down 72% from three years prior. Unsurprisingly, France’s electrical carbon footprint has grown by over 60% in the last three years, from 45g per kilowatt-hour to 71g per kilowatt-hour, and the cost to the French consumer has risen considerably. Had France stayed on its course, they would have completely decarbonized their electricity generation at the time of writing. In fact, had all countries with the ability to generate nuclear power followed France’s nuclear strategy, there is a strong argument to say that global emissions would be reduced by approximately 70%. We have built a model (SEE Appendix A) to demonstrate these findings.

Despite ample evidence and insurmountable pitfalls, the level of unwavering public support and investment into both Germany and France’s denuclearisation strategies are remarkably telling. The German and French experience is not unique. California, for example, has faced similar challenges; after investment in renewables and denuclearizing their energy mix, they found that such actions didn’t translate to lower carbon emissions or lower costs.¹⁵ A similar story can be seen in Japan. Essentially, the only countries that have successfully decarbonised their electrical consumption to date have been countries that use non-intermittent carbon-neutral technologies, such as a combination of hydro and nuclear in concert with renewables.¹⁶

One of the ways we have continued to justify this approach is to obfuscate the true cost of renewables. The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) has been the standard for comparing different costs of energy. However, this measure doesn’t consider the avoided cost—the cost of any backup energy sources and new grid constructions needed to offset intermittency constraints.¹⁷ Nor does it account for the waste associated with each energy source. Nuclear is the only energy source where its waste product is fully contained, this in turn means we have a true account of the cost of a nuclear energy system as it is completely closed. Conversely, we have no idea of the cost of remediation of rare earth metals for Solar and Wind. We have little understanding of the additional costs associated with the new grids needed to connect renewables with customers or the backup / battery provisions of renewables. The result is that renewable energy is made to seem cheaper than its alternatives. The insidious nature of this story we tell ourselves conceals the true cost of our renewables strategy. We are not creating the cost reductions needed to make fossil fuels unattractive to extract and are exacerbating the social inequalities as energy, and therefore progress, becomes more expensive. Perhaps most ironically, the age of renewables has also been the age of emissions, with carbon papering over the holes left by intermittent energy sources.

At present, the operating costs of the largest fossil fuel companies vary dramatically. However, when looking at some of the most cost effective state run (and state-subsidized) fossil fuel companies like Gazprom¹⁸, we can conclude that the minimum cost to extract is around $5mm per Terawatt hour. This gives us a very concrete goal: we need to reduce the cost of energy consumption to well under this cost of fossil fuel extraction. We know that achieving this goal on a relevant timeline is not possible with renewables alone. Renewables would need to become 5x-10x times cheaper then they are at present within the next 20–30 years (see Opex model here). We would also need to rebuild the entire electrical grid to support this new energy supply, extend the life of these renewables (so that we don’t have to replace them every 15–20 years), and develop cheap utility scale battery storage to compensate for their intermittency. With trillions of dollars already poured into this solution, wind and solar still only make up 2% of the world’s energy supply. When you look at the numbers it is clear we need another solution– one that is far more energy dense than renewables could ever be.

The Many Misconceptions Regarding Nuclear Energy

The term “nuclear energy” conjures up images of mushroom clouds and reactor meltdowns. However, much of what is believed about nuclear energy safety is factually incorrect. Nuclear energy should be seen as one of, if not the safest and cleanest forms of energy on the planet. It is even the least radioactive.¹⁹ Unfortunately, despite peer reviewed scientific studies and history itself, misconceptions about nuclear energy continue to be propagated by sensationalist headlines and HBO series. To address these misconceptions I have organised the chief safety concerns into three categories: operational hazards risks and radiation, nuclear waste disposal and nuclear proliferation concerns.

Operational Risks and Radiation

The three most notorious nuclear power plant meltdowns are Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) and, most recently, Fukushima (2011). In total, it is estimated that between 1,000 and 10,000 people died directly or indirectly in the last 67 years from nuclear energy related incidents.²⁰ To put these numbers in comparison, the 1975 Banqiao Dam failures in Henan Province, China, led to approximately 171,000 deaths and 11 million people being uprooted from their homes. These figures pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions of deaths in the last 50 years that were caused by direct and indirect effects of fossil fuels.²¹

Furthermore, a considerable number of deaths related to nuclear reactor meltdowns were preventable; they were a result of poor policy decisions, not radiation poisoning.²² Even though Chernobyl was arguably the worst nuclear power plant meltdown, only 31 people died directly from the explosion. While it is true that 6,000 people subsequently developed thyroid cancer after exposure to radioactive debris, this resulted in an estimated 160 further deaths due to the fact that thyroid cancer is generally treatable.²³ To put this in perspective, if you were one of the people who cleaned up the radioactive debris at Chernobyl, the effects on your health would be less significant than if you live with a smoker.²⁴

In fact, the radiation levels within Chernobyl’s 30 kilometer exclusion zone are now no different to that of Denver, Colorado. Quite strikingly, the area has actually become a wildlife sanctuary, suggesting that any residual radiation is far less damaging to the natural world than everyday human activity.²⁵ This image is not what one might imagine after watching the blockbuster series “Chernobyl”, which is a clear example of how scientific evidence can be sidelined in favor of hyperbole.

Given what is at stake, it is worth understanding the extent to which nuclear has been unduly demonised. Nuclear energy releases less radiation into the environment than any other major energy source. Please read that sentence again. Without trying to evoke a new wave of reductionist panic, to view nuclear in an objective way, radiation needs to be better understood in all its manifestations. The worst offender of radiation is actually coal, which contains uranium and thorium — both highly radioactive elements. Nuclear uses these minerals as well but, unlike its fossil fuel counterpart, it doesn’t release these radioactive components into the atmosphere as ash; instead, it stores and reuses these elements with surprising efficacy, which leads us to the objection of nuclear waste.

Nuclear Waste

Nuclear is the only energy source where the byproduct is fully contained.²⁶ Unlike other industrial toxic wastes, the principal hazard associated with High Level Waste (HLW), radioactivity, diminishes with time.²⁷

Nuclear waste also has an upside. In advanced nuclear reactors the waste can be re-used for energy production. Light water reactors (the most common type of reactors) use 0.5% of uranium 235, and the rest is disposed of. The byproduct — depleted uranium or Uranium 238 — is stored in HLW containment. Currently, the US has stores of 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium. This very same depleted uranium is what can be reused for energy production. Theoretically, the uranium we have already extracted is enough to generate electricity for 10 billion people, at US per capita consumption levels, for millions of years.²⁸ We have only been using coal for approximately 2000 years.

Nuclear Proliferation

Contrary to public belief, nuclear power plants don’t cause nuclear explosions, nor are they correlated to the creation of nuclear bombs; no country has created nuclear weapons after deploying civilian power stations. There are, however, three key similarities: both processes require the splitting of atoms, both use uranium and both have ‘nuclear’ in the name. These similarities, coupled with our inexactitude of language, have led to us to conflate two distinct processes that have very different outcomes.

There are two main misconceptions. The first is that a nuclear power plant meltdown can cause a nuclear explosion. To illustrate this, consider the Chernobyl disaster. There was a “conventional high-pressure failure due to excess steam. Seconds later, the remaining coolant flashed to steam and a second, even greater explosion occurred, dispersing the shattered nuclear core and effectively terminating the chain reaction. This second explosion also ejected chunks of graphite moderator into the air, which caught fire, releasing radioactive fallout”.²⁹ The explosion at Chernobyl was no more a nuclear explosion than if your car exhaust were to backfire. It just so happened that this particular explosion had a secondary effect of releasing radioactivity, similar to what might happen if there was an explosion in a hospital that blew up an X-ray machine. Once we stop conflating the non-nuclear cause of reactor meltdowns (an explosion as a result of pressured steam) with their radioactive outcomes (damage to the nuclear reactor and the release of radioactive debris), it becomes clear that the danger is pressurised water (and thus the engineering of the plant) and not the process of nuclear fission itself.

The second misconception is that countries are more likely to also create nuclear weapons if they build nuclear power plants. Firstly, a large proportion of countries have natural uranium reserves.³⁰ Building nuclear energy plants will not change this. Historically, all nuclear bombs have been made without any connection to civilian power stations and “no country has developed indigenous nuclear weapons after deploying civilian nuclear power stations”.³¹ Secondly, as mentioned, the technology used for nuclear energy production can in no way aid the creation of nuclear weapons. Lastly, even if possession of uranium was really a point of contention, there are numerous innovations in nuclear energy, which remove uranium from the equation all together. For people really worried about nuclear weapon proliferation, it is far safer to invest in inherently safe nuclear energy that removes the risk than to simply accept the status quo.

The Neglect of Nuclear

Nuclear is the most promising technology in existence to create near limitless clean and cheap energy. In the final book Stephen Hawkings contributed to, he was asked “what world-changing idea small or big would you like to see implemented by humanity?” He answered, “this is easy, I would like to see the development of [nuclear] fusion power to give an unlimited supply of clean energy to the world.”³² And yet, nuclear as an energy source has been neglected. Just last year, investment declined by nearly 45%. This is not surprising given that approximately one third of nuclear power plants remain unprofitable or face closure, but why is this the case?

The answer is deceptively simple — we have a communication problem. Public opinion has had a devastating effect on nuclear’s potential. Strong anti-nuclear backlash from all corners of the globe has created a vicious cycle; public pressure has brought about legislative constraints and policy changes. With more red tape comes project delays, supply chain disruptions, increased financing needs and ultimately less profit and less investment. Low levels of public buy-in leads to less R&D and more academics are being identified as pariahs by academic institutions. With less investment and R&D comes less innovation. Less innovation results in outdated technologies and little to no improvement in infrastructure costs. The reality is nuclear power plants we build today are still using 1950s designs. If countries had to rely on 1950s designs of solar panels and wind turbines, they would also be unattractive solutions. The good news is that 78% of the LCOE cost of nuclear power relates to construction, and the vast majority of these construction costs can be dramatically lowered by fixing outdated and inefficient designs — just imagine what this could imply for profits once a plant is operational.

Nearly all operational nuclear power plants employ light water reactor designs. Their designs are based on the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, which was constructed in 1952. These reactors were built for use underwater, as they require a constant supply of cooling water to flow over the rods in the core to avoid meltdown. This posed little risk when surrounded by sea water but, on land, it renders them inherently unstable. Rather than innovating the design, the same aquatic construction was used for terrestrial power plants. Consequently, they need to be situated near large sources of water and retrofitted with dozens of layers of safety systems to counterbalance this instability.

Compensating for the design flaws rather than innovating the design itself has meant that, over the years, these types of light water reactors have become more costly and less attractive as investments. Furthermore, retrofitted safety measures mean that new nuclear power plants often take up to three times longer to build than natural gas power plants. This delay to go to market has also skewed political incentives; as politicians are limited by their term in office, they have little motive to spend the majority of their budget commissioning a nuclear power plant that will not generate power for their constituents until they are out of office. Ask yourself this: If you were an investor or politician, would you rather have two operational natural gas plants with no public backlash, or invest in nuclear infrastructure that would reduce carbon emissions significantly, but would take more than double the amount of time to construct and would most likely make you unpopular in the public eye? It is little wonder that nuclear energy has been neglected by both camps.

One may assume that, given its high risk profile, nuclear technology would appeal to venture capitalists. However, this has not been the case. The incentive structures of VCs mean they prefer obvious capital intensive opportunities — investments that have the opportunity to inflate significantly in value, which reflects well for the fund and bolsters their narrative in order to raise more funds; more funds equals more fees. Consider e-scooter companies such as Lime and Bird. These are obvious, Capex-heavy investments that will appeal to other investors in subsequent rounds, meaning that early investors are able to easily showcase their returns. Nuclear, on the other hand, is a non-obvious capital intensive investment. Given current public sentiment, there is a strong possibility that raising subsequent rounds for a nuclear project would be both difficult and timely, meaning that investors would not be able to showcase returns for a long time, regardless of the eventual returns once the plant was up and running. This perverse incentive structure explains why, to date, Lime and Bird have received the same amount of funding as the 100 or so advanced nuclear reactor companies. If only saving the planet were more profitable.

Although the odds may be stacked against the growth of nuclear energy, these obstacles are by no means insurmountable. It is quite astonishing that, despite all of the aforementioned impediments, nuclear has managed to prevail at all. Even in the face of public opinion, lack of investment, lack of subsidies and lack of innovation, the cost of nuclear energy on a LCOE basis comes in at the same cost per terawatt-hour of production as almost all renewables, without accounting for the avoided cost inherent in renewable energy production. This is quite the accomplishment. Imagine what nuclear could do if we began to champion it, rather than neglecting and demonising it.

Nuclear is the Solution

So far, we have examined the past to understand why nuclear has been sidelined; now let’s turn our attention to the future in order to understand nuclear’s potential. Climate change must be viewed as a function of both cost and time. We know we have very limited time to solve this. We also know what our cost function needs to be — the cost of clean energy consumption needs to drop below the cost of fossil fuel extraction. It really is that simple. To do this, we need an energy-dense, stable source that has the economic potential to displace fossil fuels within a short timeframe.

Given the urgency of our situation, we should consider the potential of nuclear energy in both the short and medium term. There are a number of immediate wins, the most material of which would be: a) stopping all further decommissioning of nuclear power plants and b) amending public policy and enabling licencing for nuclear power plant production. These actions would have an outsized impact on re-energizing the nuclear energy industry and dramatically reducing the cost of energy to the end consumer. However, it is in the medium-term where the possibilities become really exciting. Rather than providing a laundry list of the potential efficiencies, I will put together a multivariate model of each technology and their potential impact on LCOE and LACE. Each of these efficiencies will lead to a virtuous cycle of cost, risk and time reductions, thereby increasing investment opportunity and further innovation.

Making nuclear energy generation safe according to the laws of physics rather than engineering renders this energy source considerably less expensive. The most dramatic cost reductions will be a result of new reactor designs that are inherently safe and dramatically cheaper to build. Below, I have summarised some of these designs, why they matter, and what stage of production they are in (live, ready for production or in R&D).

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs): Live. Reactors that can be manufactured in a factory — you can spin them up, ship them off and swap them in place of coal furnaces. Time to market is reduced from 10 to 2 years. This has a quantum impact on the financing of projects due to their predictability.

Advanced Breeder Reactors: Ready for production. Enables the use of millions to billions of years worth of energy from depleted uranium we have already extracted. These reactors can be buried below ground, where they could run for an estimated 100 years — compare this to the lifetime of a solar panel, which is approximately 20 years.

Molten Salt Reactor (MSRs): Ready for production. These reactors swap the coolant and modulator water for molten salt. At room temperature, molten salt is a solid. Whereas liquids leak, solid salt cannot. This eliminates the need for any redundant and costly safety measures. MSRs are meltdown-proof and cannot be used for nefarious purposes.

Nuclear Battery Technology (aka diamond batteries): R&D. Your phone would never have to be switched off, your car would never have to be recharged, your batteries would rarely have to be recycled: they would be powered by pieces of nuclear waste devices that could run for thousands of years.

Thorium Reactors: R&D. Thorium is arguably far safer than uranium, can be found on every continent and easily excavated. It is likely that the byproduct of thorium reactors can be handled without many safety precautions. This would result in no proliferation concerns and no carbon emissions. A piece of thorium that could fit in your hand could provide you with all of your energy needs for your entire life and would cost less than $100.

Fusion: R&D. Unlimited cheap and safe energy. Fusing two atoms together is arguably safer than splitting atoms (fission). While derided by the scientific community as an unattainable source of unlimited power, there have been significant advancements in fusion, meaning that this technology may become a reality within the next 5–10 years.

Conclusion

Collectively, we approach the climate crisis through a lens of morality rather than objectivity. There are deeply entrenched cultural beliefs and connotations about the virtues of renewables, and equally strongly held beliefs about the sacrilegious nature of nuclear energy. These beliefs have led us to an impasse; we have an escalating climate crisis, but are disregarding the most efficient route towards reaching our collective goal of decarbonisation.

Most of us seem to vigorously accept the science regarding climate change, while overlooking the scientific recommendations set out by the climatologists. We ignore the likes of James Hensen, the godfather of climate science, Stephen Hawking, perhaps the most famous theoretical physicist, and James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis. Instead of heeding their advocacy of nuclear energy as the solution to climate change, we seek refuge in the solutions espoused by Leonardo DiCaprio, Naiomi Klien and Jane Fonda.

James Hensen said: “[…] if we want young people to have a future, then we’re going to have to find alternatives and at this time nuclear seems to be the best candidate.” Rather than quote his entire talk, I highly recommend you watch it. When he gave this speech Solar and Wind effectively made up about 1% of total energy supply (TES). Eight years and trillions of investment dollars later, they make up 2% of TES. How long are we going to wait for this to speed up? (If you don’t believe it take a look here).

The scariest thing to me is that many still believe there should be a moratorium on new nuclear power plant construction. Several countries with the capability to build nuclear power plants are actively phasing out nuclear power generation. This year alone, five US nuclear power plants are going to be decommissioned, which accounts for approximately 5% of US nuclear energy production. For comparison, only 1% of US coal powered plants are going to be decommissioned.³³ While there are only 35 countries³⁴ that have been able to build nuclear power plants, they make up more than 70%³⁵ of carbon emissions.³⁶ In order to decarbonise the world’s atmosphere, we need to reduce carbon emissions by 80%.

During my research, perhaps the strongest arguments for the potential of nuclear power were, ironically, found in Naomi Klein’s book. She cites Dan Kahan’s study about how political affiliation affects a person’s perspective on climate change. Kahan examines how people who consider themselves as highly “hierarchical” and “individualist”, both common identifiers of those on the political right, object at any mention of regulation, including regulation around climate change. To be clear, I do not think this should be a politicized issue but, unfortunately, it has become one. Using broad generalizations, the left are advocates of climate change and climate action, while the right are often more resistant. Why this matters is that only having buy-in from ~50% of the global population is a significant impediment to solving this disaster.³⁷ We need a full-court press.

Climate change is a surmountable problem if we rethink our approach and rely on science rather than morality. Expecting individuals to reduce consumption, businesses to go green and governments to act in coordination is not going to work. Either we continue to offset our carbon guilt, pursuing reductionist strategies and advocating for renewables alone, or we reframe the way we look at this problem, asking instead: how can we create abundant, clean and cheap energy? Unfortunately, renewables have proven themselves unfit for the challenge and have been an expensive gamble in both money and time. On the other hand, not only has Nuclear proven efficacy in clean energy production, it provides our best chance to create enough economic efficiencies to undercut fossil fuels and win the profit war — only our fixation on reducing consumption and our collective stigma of nuclear energy production is preventing us from avoiding disaster.

Nuclear energy needs a rebrand.

[1] Arguably, a diet that is increasingly restrictive in perpetuity.

[2] According to MIT professor Jeremy England, life is merely an inevitable consequence of thermodynamics. He argues that living systems are the best way of dissipating energy from an external source. Bacteria, beetles and humans are the most efficient way to use up sunlight. According to England the process of entropy means that molecules that sit long enough under a heat lamp will eventually structure themselves to metabolize, move and self replicate. Granted this process might take billions of years. His theory suggests that what humans are really good at is nothing more than using up energy.

[3] UN Environment, ‘Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2019’, Frankfurt School for Climate and Sustainable Energy Finance, FS-UNEP Collaborating Centre <https://www.unep.org/resources/report/global-trends-renewable-energy-investment-2019>

[4] Professor Ian Chapman, ‘Putting the Sun in a Bottle: The path to delivering sustainable fusion power’, Lecture, The Royal Society, January 27 2021 <https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2021/01/kavli-lecture/>

[5] Jessica Hamzelou, ‘Overeating now bigger global problem than lack of food’, New Scientist, 13 December 2012 <https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23004-overeating-now-bigger-global-problem-than-lack-of-food/>

[6] The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization’s level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is able to use.

[7] United Nations: Climate Change, The Paris Agreement, <https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement>

[8] I have included a list of the major fossil fuel providers and their operating costs by output to give you a better sense of what this might be on a dollar basis.

[9] United Nations, ‘Population’, <https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/population/>

[10] US Energy Information Administration, ‘Today in Energy’,<https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41433>

[11] Professor Ian Chapman, ‘Putting the Sun in a Bottle: The path to delivering sustainable fusion power’, Lecture, The Royal Society, January 27 2021 <https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2021/01/kavli-lecture/>

[12] Wikipedia, ‘Hornsea Wind Farm’, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsea_Wind_Farm>

[13] Stephen Jarvis, Olivier Deschenes & Akshaya Jha, ‘The Private and External Costs of Germany’s Nuclear Phase Out’, National Bureau of Economic Research, 26598 (2019), DOI:10.3386/w26598.

[14] Nuclear Energy Agency: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, The Costs of Decarbonisation: System Costs with High Shares of Nuclear and Renewables, <https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_15000>

[15] Mark Nelson and Madison Czerwinski, ‘With Nuclear instead of Renewables, California & Germany Would Already Have 100% Clean Electricity’, Environmental Progress, September 11 2018, <https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/9/11/california-and-germany-decarbonization-with-alternative-energy-investments

[16] Climate impact by Area, Electricity Map, <https://www.electricitymap.org>; You might be thinking that we should make more Dams and not nuclear reactors. Unfortunately, many countries do not have access to large water sources, and hydro can have tremendous ecological and geopolitical repercussions. Countries such as Ethiopia provide a good illustration of the potential conflicts that can emerge as the result of dam construction.

[17] LCOE allows the “comparison of different technologies of unequal life spans, different project sizes and capital costs, and capacities”. It is a really useful measure when comparing like for like: coal vs nuclear vs biomass vs gas. The problem about also applying this standard to renewables is not comparing like for like. LACE stands for Levelized Avoided Cost of Electricity, and is a measure of what it would cost the grid to generate the electricity that is otherwise displaced by a new generation project, i.e., it is a measure of the market value of that electricity.

[18]

[19] Richard Rhodes, ‘Why Nuclear Power Must be Part of the Energy Solution’, Yale Environment 360, July 19 2019, <https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-nuclear-power-must-be-part-of-the-energy-solution-environmentalists-climate>

[20] The reality is that these numbers are hotly disputed and while the majority of the scientific community put the number between 1,000 and 10,000 activist organisations such as Greenpeace or the European Green Party put the figure at 50,000+. Even if you were to accept these figures, it is possibly the strongest argument for investment in nuclear energy R&D as the vast amount of investment in advanced nuclear reactors is around making nuclear safer by design and therefore lowering costs. As articulated in the following sections.

[21] Matthew Green, ‘Fossil fuel pollution causes one in five premature deaths globally: study’, Reuters, February 9 2021, <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-pollution-fossil/fossil-fuel-pollution-causes-one-in-five-premature-deaths-globally-study-idUSKBN2A90UB>

[22] Neither Three Mile Island nor Fukushima resulted in any direct deaths. The majority of deaths (573) occurred as the result of a poor policy decision to relocate elderly people away from the Fukushima Daiichi plant. According to the WHO study of the Fukushima disaster, there was a 70% increase in risk of developing thyroid cancer for the population inside the Fukushima prefecture. This is, undoubtedly, a safety concern. However, when this risk is compared to the risks associated with other sources of energy production, our collective stigma begins to expose itself.

[23] E. Cardis and M. Hatch, ‘The Chernobyl Accident — An Epidemiological Perspective, Clinical Oncology, 23 (2011), <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clon.2011.01.510>

[24] United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, ‘Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation’ (New York: United Nations, 2008).

[25] Adam Vaughan, ‘Wildlife Thriving around Chernobyl nuclear plant despite radiation’, The Guardian, 5 October 2015 <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/05/wildlife-thriving-around-chernobyl-nuclear-plant-despite-radiation>

[26] It is the only self-contained system. “Ah, but that waste is highly dangerous” a savvy reader might challenge. Not exactly. Nuclear waste has been categorised into three levels according to radioactivity and corresponding safety precautions needed: low, intermediate or high-level waste. 90% of all nuclear waste is categorised low-level, the disposal of which “is straightforward and can be undertaken safely almost anywhere”#. Intermediate level waste makes up about 7% of waste, and although more radioactive, is also safely disposed of with relative ease; in near-surface disposal places at ground level, or in caverns below ground level (~10 meters deep). Only ~0.3% of all nuclear waste is classified as high-level waste, which requires special precaution. (Note: these disposal solutions are no longer needed once nuclear waste can be reused).

[27] World Nuclear Association, ‘Radioactive Waste: Myths and Realities’, February 2020, <https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-wastes-myths-and-realities.aspx>

[28] Wikipedia, ‘Terra Power’, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower>

[29] David Robert Grimes, ‘Why it’s time to dispel the myths about nuclear power’, The Guardian, 11 April 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/apr/11/time-dispel-myths-about-nuclear-power-chernobyl-fukushima>

[30] Wikipedia, List of Countries by Uranium Reserves’, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_reserves>

[31] Patrik Hermansson, ‘Debunking myths on nuclear power (it’s not for making bombs)’, The Conversation, 29 December 2019, <https://theconversation.com/debunking-myths-on-nuclear-power-its-not-for-making-bombs-20013>

[32] Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to Big Questions (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2018).

[33] L.M. Sixel, ‘Record number of nuclear power plants set to close in 2021’, Houston Chronicle, 12 January 2021, <https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/amp/Nuclear-coal-plants-to-retire-in-2021-15864484.php>

[34] Wikipedia, ‘Nuclear Power by Country’, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country>

[35] It should be noted that electricity makes up about 72% of carbon emissions; Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, ‘Global Emissions’,<https://www.c2es.org/content/international-emissions/#:~:text=Globally%2C%20the%20primary%20sources%20of,72%20percent%20of%20all%20emissions>

[36] Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘Each Country’s Share of CO2 Emissions’, 12 August 2020, <https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions>

[37] What is significant is that this same group that are typically resistant to regulations, tend to like big, centralized technologies that reinforce that humans can dominate nature. Nuclear energy fits squarely within both world views: we have the opportunity to save the planet (the political left can get behind this cause), in a way that fosters innovation and growth rather than through regulation (the political right will lend support as well). To tease this concept out a bit more, Kahan’s study was constructed to test people’s views on climate change. Each subject was shown a fake news story, with one crucial difference: the narrative. There were facts about climate change in each news story, but three different narratives in play: 1) the solution is about introducing anti-pollution measures, 2) nuclear is the solution or 3) no narrative, just facts. The findings were significant: conservatives were much more open to the facts about climate change when given the nuclear narrative as the solution, and had more skepticism about the facts when the anti-pollution narrative was in play than when they saw the facts alone.This makes sense. The objection to renewables from the right is not because they are through to solve climate change. Their objection is because they require both reduction in consumption and progress and legislation. Nuclear on the other hand is a ”heavy industrial technology, based on extraction, run in a corporatist manner, with long ties to the military-industrial complex. And as renowned psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton has noted, no technology does more to confirm the notion that man has tamed nature than the ability to split the atom”.

Appendix 1:

Calculating the percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions under French nuclear energy usage March 2021.

Introduction

The goal of this analysis was to calculate the percent change in global carbon dioxide emissions under the predictive scenario that all countries change percent nuclear usage to that of France.

Statistical Methodology

The data were retrieved from the bp website in an Excel workbook. All data manipulation, cleaning, and analysis were performed using the statistical programming language R (R Core Team 2020). The two relevant worksheets, “Primary Energy — Cons by fuel” and “Carbon Dioxide Emissions” were extracted using the R package readxl (Wickham & Bryan 2019). The North America, South and Central America, Europe, CIS, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, World, OECD, Non-OECD, and European Union totals were removed, leaving only summaries for each country. For the years 2018 and 2019, the percent of nuclear energy used was calculated by taking the nuclear consumption and dividing by the total consumption per country. These data were merged with 2018 and 2019 carbon dioxide emissions for each country.

The following procedure was employed for the 2018 and 2019 data set separately. First, the percent nuclear benchmark was defined as the percent nuclear usage by France. A variable was defined to quantify how much more energy consumption would need to be converted to nuclear to meet the French benchmark (as a percent).

The following assumptions were made, (1) that nuclear, hydroelectric, and renewables did not contribute to the observed CO2 emissions and (2) that oil, natural gas, and coal contributed 100% of the observed CO2 emissions.

The consumption of oil, natural gas, and coal were summed to generate a total ‘emitters’ consumption and the corresponding percent ‘emitters’ consumption. An updated percent ‘emitters’ consumption was calculated by subtracting the percent needed to reach the French benchmark from the percent ‘emitters’ consumption. If this result was negative, it was replaced with 0. For countries with no nuclear capability (Bangladesh, Belarus, Turkey), the percent ‘emitters’ consumption remained unchanged. This was then used to update the total consumption by emitters. To estimate the associated change in CO2 emissions, a linear regression was fit with response variable log(emissions) and explanatory variable log(total consumption of emitters). Model assumptions were checked using residuals plots and performing Shapiro-Wilk, Non-constant variance, and Durbin-Watson tests on studentized residuals. Two outliers were removed during model fitting. Updated emissions were generated by predicting emissions using the updated total consumption of emitters.

Predicted emissions were summed to generate a global aggregate and then compared to the actual global aggregate (from the data) for the years 2018 and 2019. The percent decline in global emissions was calculated.

Results and Discussion

The results of global carbon dioxide emissions comparisons are provided in Table 1. For 2018, carbon dioxide emissions decreased from 33134 to 19528 millions of tons, a 70% decrease. For 2019, emissions decreased from 33294.6 to 19806 millions of tons, a 68% decrease.

This modeling procedure assumes oil, coal, and natural gas are responsible for all CO2 emissions in each country and treats all three equally, a simplifying assumption needed to work with this data. More sophisticated modeling approaches would include the individual contribution to CO2 emissions of each type of energy source.

Literature Cited

R Core Team (2020). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.org/.

Wickham, H. and Bryan, J. (2019). readxl: Read Excel Files. R package version 1.3.1. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=readxl