Why Nuclear Power is Part of the Answer for the Climate Crisis
My colleague, Dr. M.V. Ramana, has released a press release via the University of British Columbia (UBC) in light of his new book. If you so wish, you can read the release here.
As a fellow member of Faculty at UBC, and in terms of guiding us through the climate crisis, I strongly disagree with many aspects of this release, and here are is some evidence and discussion to support my claims.
For some background and context, I am a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Engineering at UBC. I used to run an Advanced Nuclear Engineering Masters course at Imperial College for five years, and at UBC, I now teach a fourth year technical elective on Manufacturing for Clean Energy.
I believe that we do need so-called ‘clean energy’, and we also have to address how we consume our energy across society, while recognizing the potential disproportionate impact of the energy transition that may impact people who are less privileged. I also recognize the importance of academic freedom, and that a fair discussion and discourse can provide opportunities for a wide range of viewpoints to be shared, and better solutions to be posed.
How do you respond to claims that nuclear energy is necessary for meeting our carbon reduction goals?
Many technologies have low carbon footprints but we need to consider two other important factors: cost and deployment time.Nuclear energy is one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity. Investing in cheaper low-carbon sources of energy will provide more emission reductions per dollar. Second, it takes about a decade to build a nuclear plant. If you add the time needed for environmental clearances, community consent and raising the huge amounts of funding necessary, you’re looking at 15–20 years before a nuclear project can even start producing electricity. This timeline is incompatible with the urgent demands of climate science.
Cost
Nuclear power is an expensive solution largely due to the cost of financing. The nuclear power industry has largely had it’s “hands tied” due to the access to financial instruments and support. For example, in July of 2022 the EU finally added Nuclear Power to the green taxonomy which provides nuclear power projects access to finance that is available to other forms of ‘green’ tech.
There are multiple other factors that influence cost — including the fact that nuclear power has a very conservative cost envelope in terms of risk management (which is entirely understandable), and that the nuclear power industry in the ‘west’ has a very substantive skills gap, and regulation gap, in terms of deployment of new power stations. Canada has not built a new reactor since 1993 — i.e. 30 years ago. Given the climate crisis, rolling blackouts, and the thirst for energy this is changing across the world, and so we will see cost reduction (as things get cheaper as we build more) but investment and new build is largely driven by Asia.
Further opportunities to reduce cost could be made available, either by a state-led endorsement to build out a large reactor set (i.e. reducing costs by building up a labor force) or through the investment and deployment of a small modular reactor (SMR) fleet. In the SMR paradigm, nuclear reactors can be built in a factory and then shipped to site (internationally) for local deployment with local grid connections, for example replacing existing and aging fossil fleet.
Timing
The “nuclear power takes too long” is a timeless argument that falls into a “jam tomorrow” narrative. You don’t complain about the speed of baking a very fancy cake — you appreciate that the value of this object can be drawn out, if the end goal is worth it. You also provide for your guests in the meantime, with a range of different offerings that take you a different amount of time to prepare.
Nuclear power reactors, in their current form, tend to be very large object s— typically each with a capacity of >1 gigawatts of electrical output (>1 GWe), and they have a very good ‘uptime’ where they generate about 90% of that potential power to the grid, for a likely lifetime of 60–90 years. This contrasts with many other forms of collaborative (in the sense that we need them too) renewable energy projects which tend to be deployable much faster timescale. [For some context, Canada uses about 60 GW of electricity in total, and currently gets 19% of its electricity from Nuclear power.]
For the “15–20 years” argument in terms of timing — I agree this is a fair critique for the industry in terms of cost to completion of a new project, but it’s not a fair critique in comparison to other potential solutions, nor how the nuclear is moving forward, and could move forward. If you want to have nuclear power making an impact in the shorter term, just keep the existing fleets open as long as possible — e.g. keep reactors like Diablo Canyon open as long as possible, and renovate + refurbish the existing fleet like they are doing in Canada.
Concurrently, invest in new ways of doing to break this cycle of slower build, while also future proofing our energy supply for generations through the investment in a diverse portfolio of power generation solutions, together with a shift in how society consumes its energy.
I continue to realize that the more people say something is difficult and will take a long time, the easier it is for people to avoid doing something. There are many talented folks in the nuclear industry who want to contribute to a low-carbon future, but they need wider society (and state) backing to enable their contributes to be realized. Some of this may be state-based investment, but concurrently, a social license is important in navigating some of the many difficult and important decisions that we will have to make for any of our low-carbon future technologies.
Net Zero by 2050 remains 25 years in the future, and we will still have a risk of having excess CO2 emissions then, especially if we let 9% of our low carbon sources (i.e. nuclear power) atrophy. We have significant data that indicates that when nuclear power stations close/shut down often result in fossil fuel sources ‘filling the gap’, and the absence of new build for nuclear power continues to make addressing climate change ever harder. Most scenario planners (e.g. the IEA) that aim to reduce CO2 emissions to Net Zero by 2050 continue to have nuclear power as part of their energy mixes.
Risk
The risk argument presented is simple fear mongering. Inappropriate public risk management, especially for nuclear power, can and has cost lives. If you want some evidence on this, turn to the UN and their expert (and my colleague) Professor Geraldine Thomas, now retired from Imperial College London, who explores how misconceptions on the health implications of radiation have a real impact on how we mange industrial accidents.
If you are also interested in nuclear radiation and effective dose, this handy chart & explainer from XKCD highlights how radiation is everywhere — and that’s important, but also note that radiation from nuclear power is tightly controlled and managed.
And just because the facts are important — 30 people directly died from Chernobyl and no one directly died from the Fukushima incident (~23k people tragically lost their lives due to the tsunami), for a bigger explainer on this see Hannah Ritchie over at Our World in Data.
Waste
Nuclear waste is a challenge, but something we’ve done a pretty good job of addressing. As a contrast, CO2 is the waste product of the fossil industry and we have NOT done a good job there. However, nuclear power also uses a very dense energy source, and this is important in terms of the (relative) cost of resource extraction and the (relative) cost of waste management.
In managing nuclear waste, the story remains complicated but there are many technological solutions that work and are currently being deployed. Longer term issues, as well as cleaning up older R&D facilities and nuclear weapons development sites, continue to be a major headache for the wider nuclear industry — but modern nuclear power has largely addressed these concerns.
In the shorter term (100 to 200 years), we have multiple solutions that capture and store nuclear waste. One of these is simply putting the nuclear materials in a glassy matrix and locking it up at the atomic scale (vitrification). This glass material then gets packed into several other layers (we like to wrap up things in multiple layers, the so-called ‘defense in depth’ principle), similar to how you might want to send a parcel to a loved on, prior to storing it. Colleagues around the world are looking at alternatives, including some synthetic rock (a neat project idea).
Longer term solutions (i.e. disposal) are on their way, and even in Canada there seem to be positive trends towards finding sites and communities that want to take on this challenge to support a low carbon future for us all. This builds on lots of work internationally, and we can see some great progress in Sweden for their deep geological disposal/repository site.
Proliferation
The government of Canada remains deeply committed to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) (1970), which remains the only legally binding global treaty promoting nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. — Global Affairs, Canada.
Nuclear power and nuclear weapons have an entwined history in many countries, but it is remarkable that (for instance), Canada has a nuclear power industry but does not have a nuclear weapons industry.
The dual use of technology argument is a very hot topic right now, and we can see this story being played out across multiple places, including the use of AI in combat. It’s therefore especially important to note that unlike many other industries, the nuclear industry has a state-backed international agreement that has been ratified across many nations across the world.
Closing Thoughts
Nuclear power remains one of many promising solutions that we will need if we wish to retain access to energy, and provide a socially just transition across the globe.
There are lots of other solutions which will be important for different countries, different industries, and different directions forward. I spend 30+ hours exploring this with my students in my course on Clean Energy Manufacturing at UBC, while exploring some of the policy levers and social trends that tend to influence in these spaces.
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Dr Ben Britton is an Associate Professor at UBC, hired in 2021, and was previously a Reader at Imperial College London where he started his academic career. He maintains a Visiting Readership at Imperial College London. Views here are his own etc. etc.
You can often find him skeeting (the more hip version of tweeting, maybe) as @bmatb.
