Atomic Fallacy: Why Nuclear Power Won’t Solve the Climate Crisis

I am scared about how fast climate change is disrupting our world. At a theoretical level, I have known for decades about growing carbon dioxide emissions and resultant changes to global and local temperatures, sea-level rise, severe storms, wildfires, and so on. But it was not till 2012, when Hurricane Sandy hit the northeast of the United States, that I was directly impacted. The power of that storm was immense, but I knew—theoretically, of course—that people elsewhere had experienced far worse storms.

More recently—in August 2023, as I was finishing this book—it was the turn of wildfires. As the McDougall Creek wildfire came closer to the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus in Kelowna, students and staff were asked to evacuate. My daughter Shruti is a student there. Because it was summer, she was at home in the Vancouver campus of UBC, where I teach. Had the fires occurred just two weeks later, I would have definitely been panicking.

I can go on for much longer in this vein. But there isn’t any need. Just about anyone alive today has been impacted in some way by climate change. Others have written at length about how the climate crisis is intensifying by the year, and one can stock a small library with published books about the myriad risks flowing from climate change. The library would be even larger if one included literature on the other related multiple cascading ecological crises we are confronting.

As someone trained in physics, and as an academic paid to research, I have been drawn to studying one essential contributor to these crises: how energy and electricity are produced, especially those methods proposed to mitigate climate change. Prominent among these proposals is nuclear energy.

Although climate change scares me, I am even more scared of a future with more nuclear plants. Increasing how much energy is produced with nuclear reactors would greatly exacerbate the risk of severe accidents like the one at Chernobyl, expand how much of our environment is contaminated with radioactive wastes that remain hazardous for millennia, and last but not least, make catastrophic nuclear war more likely.

Some might argue that these risks are the price we must pay to counter the threat of climate change. I disagree, but even if one were to adopt this position, my research shows that nuclear energy is just not a feasible solution to climate change. A nuclear power plant is a really expensive way to produce electricity. And nuclear energy simply cannot be scaled fast enough to match the rate at which the world needs to lower carbon emissions to stay under 1.5 degrees Celsius, or even 2 degrees.

Cost and the slow rate of deployment largely explain why the share of global electricity produced by nuclear reactors has been steadily declining, from around 16.9 percent in 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was signed, to 9.2 percent in 2022. In contrast, as the costs of wind and solar energy declined dramatically, and modern renewables (which do not include large dams) went from supplying 1.2 percent of the world’s electricity in 1997 to 14.4 percent in 2022.

Another contrast is revealing. When pro-nuclear advocates talk about solving climate change with nuclear energy, they call for building lots and lots of reactors. The World Nuclear Association, for example, proposes building thousands of nuclear reactors, which would together be capable of generating a million megawatts of electricity, by 2050. Such a goal is completely at odds with historical rates of building nuclear reactors.

Some proponents of nuclear energy refuse to give up on the technology. They blame the decline in nuclear energy and the high costs and long construction periods on the characteristics of older reactor designs, arguing that alternative designs will rescue nuclear energy from its woes. In recent years, the alternatives most often advertised are small modular (nuclear) reactors—SMRs for short. These are designed to generate between 10 and 300 megawatts of power, much less than the 1,000–1,600 megawatts that reactors being built today are designed to produce.

For over a decade now, many of my colleagues and I have consistently explained why these reactors would not be commercially viable and why they would never resolve the undesirable consequences of building nuclear power plants. I first started examining small modular reactors when I worked at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. Our group largely comprised physicists, and we used a mixture of technical assessments, mathematical techniques, and social-science-based methods to study various problems associated with these technologies. My colleague Alex Glaser, for example, used neutronics models to calculate how much uranium would be required as fuel for SMRs, which we then used to estimate the increased risk of nuclear weapons proliferation from deploying such reactors. Zia Mian, originally from Pakistan, and I showed why the technical characteristics of SMRs would not allow for simultaneously solving the four key problems identified with nuclear power: its high costs, its accident risks, the difficulty of dealing with radioactive waste, and its linkage with the capacity to make nuclear weapons. My colleagues and I also undertook case studies on Jordan, Ghana, and Indonesia, three countries advertised by SMR vendors as potential customers, and showed that despite much talk, none of them were investing in SMRs, because of various country-specific reasons such as public opposition and institutional interests.

We were not the only people coming up with reasons for not believing in the claim that new reactor designs would solve all these problems. Other scientists and analysts also highlighted the dangers and false promises of SMRs.

Nuclear advocates are not deterred by such arguments. They insist that this time it will be different. Nuclear plants would be cheap, would be quick to build, would be safe, would never have to be shut down in unplanned ways, and would not be affected by climate-related extreme weather events. The evidence from the real world, which I elaborate on later, suggests otherwise. Nuclear reactors are unlikely to possess any of these characteristics, let alone all of them. Thus, what is actually being advocated might be termed faux nuclear plants, existing only in the imagination of some, not in the real world.

My bottom line is that nuclear energy, whether with old reactor designs or new faux alternatives, will simply not resolve the climate crisis. The threat from climate change is urgent. The world has neither the financial resources nor the luxury of time to expand nuclear power. Meanwhile, even a limited expansion would aggravate a range of environmental and ecological risks. Further, nuclear energy is deeply imbricated in creating the conditions for nuclear annihilation. Expanding nuclear power would leave us in the worst of both worlds.

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Proponents of nuclear energy have other reasons to support their preferred technology. They argue that nuclear reactors can do much more than just generate electricity. The “much more” depends on the specific context, and could include creating well-paying jobs, boosting national pride, providing energy independence, supplying clean water, and producing medical isotopes to treat cancer. As the public has become more concerned about climate change, nuclear advocates have appended to this list two more applications for energy from nuclear reactors: capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (direct air capture) and producing hydrogen and high-temperature heat for industrial processes.

All of these are reminiscent of what Admiral Lewis Strauss, one of the central characters in the hit Hollywood film Oppenheimer and the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s, told the National Association of Science Writers on September 16, 1954. Ten days after the groundbreaking for first US nuclear plant, Strauss told his audience that given the great promise of nuclear technology, it would not be “too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.”

The many claims about what else nuclear reactors can do make one wonder: Is nuclear energy too virtuous to meter?

Let me offer one example from a company called Hyperion Power Generation offering a small nuclear power plant design that was actively covered in the media between 2007 and 2012. In March 2010, the founder of this company, John Deal, told the Albuquerque Journal, “We started this company to clean water in Africa…Our emphasis is helping people not die from not having clean water…If you’ve got energy, you can have all the clean water you want.”

This was not a one-off sales pitch. In their 2011 article in Issues in Science and Technology, writer Ross Carper and academic Sonja Schmid offer this description of Deal in action:

In the middle of Deal’s talk in Denver, he began flipping through some artist-drawn images. The most striking of all shows a small nuclear reactor, buried and unattended at what looked to be less than 15 feet below the surface. Two simple tubes snake upward from the reactor, drawing the eye to a pair of gray above-ground tanks, with the words “Potable Water” stamped on the side. The setting? An impoverished African village complete with about a dozen mud-constructed, thatch-roofed huts. A handful of people were drawn into the image, all of them walking to or from the clean water source, which is apparently powered by a $50 million HPM.

HPM stands for Hyperion Power Module, the nuclear reactor the company was advertising, and the cost estimate of $50 million for a nuclear reactor should be seen in that light as wishfully cheap. (A few years later, PitchBook, a database of private equity-based corporations, listed the company as “out of business.”)

Such promises of atomic energy delivering progress to Africa date back to the beginning of the nuclear age. On January 28, 1947, for example, Waldemar Kaempffert, the science editor of the New York Times, predicted,

The desert of Sahara could easily be irrigated by electric pumps driven by uranium power, with the result that more surplus cotton than we could sell at a profit and more surplus plant food than we could eat would be dumped on the market. Africa would be transformed into another Europe, with savages [sic!] who never saw a steam shovel or railway train transformed into machine tenders.

After more than half a century of experience with nuclear technology, ideas about using it to provide clean water to poor people are delusional at worst and deceptively self-serving at best. Reducing the problem of insufficient clean water to an absence of energy ignores the many other problems that prevent African villagers from accessing clean water and the persisting legacies of colonialism and imperialism that led to “underdevelopment” in the first place.

In his “communal memoir” of the aerospace industry Blue Sky Dream, the journalist David Beers talks about a special characteristic of the former Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the man sometimes termed “the father of America’s space program” due to his important role in transferring rocket technology to the United States.

The classic American entrepreneurial hero searches out unmet desires in the everyday world and then, with a certain flexible flair, invents the answers, products for the masses to use. Von Braun’s genius lay elsewhere. He was brilliant at inventing new and different uses for the only product he ever desired to make, the space rocket. He was a master at selling his one product to the only customers who could ever afford it, a nation’s rulers.

Much like von Braun, vendors and advocates of nuclear power are really interested only in selling nuclear reactors, and they try to invent different uses for their favored product. Delivering clean water, heating houses or industries, and propelling rockets and ships are all only vehicles for selling nuclear reactors. However, the appeal to other uses for nuclear reactors is also, simultaneously, an expression of the inability of the technology to economically deliver on its primary product: electricity. It is the weakness of the nuclear industry that forces it to seek alliances with other constituencies.

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From Nuclear Is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change by M.V. Ramana. Copyright © 2024. Available from Verso Books.