The Nuclear Power Debate: A Terrifying Threat or a Necessary Risk?
A terrifying threat to the planet. There has been a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union, and the Soviets have admitted that it happened—the worst accident in the short history of the world's nuclear power industry. A disaster we see people fighting to prevent. Tens of thousands demonstrated on Saturday against plans to extend the life of the country's nuclear power stations. But for others, a risk worth taking.
“We have an urgent and enormous challenge in front of us. We really cannot afford the luxury to say no,” said a nuclear advocate, highlighting the pressing need for clean energy solutions.
A nuclear power plant, a symbol of both promise and peril.
Nuclear power is divisive. China and India have been ramping up their capacities to get electricity to hundreds of millions more people without raising emissions. Other countries, from Germany to Japan, have been switching off plants because they’re worried about safety. A new generation of environmentalists are worried about seeing sources of carbon-free electricity shut down.
Do We Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change?
Should we risk it to keep the planet from heating? We’re supposed to double the amount of nuclear power by 2050, according to one pathway to clean electricity from the International Energy Agency. If you listen to the World Nuclear Association, it’s not nearly enough. Talk to anti-nuclear activists, and they say it’s too dangerous. Scientists have mixed opinions on whether betting on nuclear is such a good idea.
Let’s break it down. It’s hard to imagine now that people used to see nuclear power as a beacon of hope. It created jobs and generated electricity without polluting the air. Until the mid-1970s, Americans mostly wanted nuclear power. But that support soon soured.
“We and the world, which is our home, live on the brink of nuclear annihilation,” was the rallying cry at the first Earth Day protest in the U.S. during the Cold War. The call to ban nukes resonated with hippies and environmentalists who hated anything nuclear. It wasn’t just bombs—they saw the whole technology as dirty and dangerous.
Protesters rally against nuclear power, driven by fears of its dangers.
They were kind of proven right in 1979 when a nuclear reactor went into partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in the U.S. Nobody died, but it cost one billion dollars to clean up. And we’ve probably all heard of the infamous Chernobyl disaster in 1986. A reactor went out of control and blew up after overheated uranium melted through protective barriers. It spewed radioactive material and isotopes into the atmosphere and left the surrounding area uninhabitable.
The disaster at Chernobyl was the worst in the history of nuclear power generation. The explosion itself killed two people, and 28 emergency workers died of radiation sickness within three months. Scientists estimate the long-term death toll from the radiation stretches into the thousands. That all made the nuclear industry tighten its standards, but across the world, the idea of a safe nuclear power plant had already started to crumble.
The Fukushima Wake-Up Call
Fast forward 25 years. Most nuclear power plants have been built close to coasts or rivers so they can use water to get rid of waste heat. But that’s left them vulnerable to floods. Japan experienced this in 2011 when an earthquake and tsunami struck its coast, killing more than 19,000 people and sending three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant into meltdown. The reactors survived the quake, but the floods cut off power to the pumps that kept the fuel rods cool. As radiation leaked from the plant, authorities evacuated residents and set up a 20-kilometer exclusion zone.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster highlighted the risks of natural disasters to nuclear plants.
With disasters like these, it’s no surprise people find nuclear power apocalyptic. But take a look at the numbers, and that fear doesn’t hold up. Compared to renewable sources of energy, nuclear has killed more people for each terawatt-hour of electricity generated. But let’s put that in the context of fossil fuels. The death rates from burning gas, oil, and coal make nuclear seem almost as safe as solar or wind. That’s because burning fossil fuels releases toxic particles that damage our lungs and hearts. The air pollution they cause kills an estimated 8 million people a year.
Comparing nuclear and coal is like comparing planes and cars. While we obsess about plane crashes, far more people die on the road than in the air for every kilometer they travel. But plane crashes make headlines, and so they seem scarier. The same goes for nuclear disasters.
“If you compare the nuclear industry with all the other industries, certainly fossil fuels, the number of total fatalities is really minimal,” says a nuclear safety expert.
But there’s a big catch here. There’ve only been a handful of nuclear disasters in history, and so one catastrophic event could change the whole discussion. On top of that, the death toll from today’s nuclear may not tell the full story because spent fuel rods stay radioactive for tens of thousands of years.
The Climate Change Argument
The idea that nuclear is safer than fossil fuel alternatives is one reason why some people are changing their minds about it. The bigger one is that, in terms of climate change, nuclear is clean. Its CO2 emissions are about as low as solar and wind over its lifetime, and it also provides a pretty constant supply of electricity. As countries kick fossil fuels out of their energy grids, nuclear could provide a steady base load for when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing.
Factors like these have gained nuclear power some unlikely supporters. “When a nuclear plant is shut down, it is replaced by fossil fuels. That’s bad,” says a Brazilian model-turned-nuclear advocate. Many environmentalists have made it clear that they’re friendlier to nuclear than previous generations.
“I became a nuclear engineer in the first place because I’m an environmentalist. Ten years ago, I changed my mind about nuclear energy. I realized that we needed nuclear energy to solve climate change,” says a nuclear engineer.
Their biggest worry is that quitting nuclear means burning more fossil fuels. Let’s take a look at Germany. It’s been shutting down nuclear plants for decades and is set to close its last one by 2023. Its rapid nuclear phase-out is one of the most infamous in the world. After the Fukushima disaster, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that Germany was pulling out of nuclear energy entirely, cheered on by all the big political parties and most of the public.
But that decision may have proved costly. A study in 2019 estimated that quitting nuclear slowed Germany’s coal exit so much that it led to 1,100 more deaths than expected from breathing dirty air each year. The annual social cost is 12 billion dollars. It’s the same story in the U.S., where nuclear closures have propped up fossil fuels in California and New York.
Coal plants, which often replace nuclear, contribute heavily to air pollution.
Nuclear advocates often use Germany’s phase-out as the big example for why we should keep plants open. But experts say that’s only half the story. Germany’s electricity emissions actually later fell as renewables pushed coal out of the mix. Energy experts say the massive expansion of renewables was only politically possible because the government agreed to quit nuclear.
“You can argue it both ways, but probably Germany would have been able to reduce its emissions a bit quicker if it’s done differently. But also, that supported really the uptake of renewables, not only in Germany but globally,” says Muriel Gonier, an expert on nuclear power in Germany, France, and Japan.
She says that investment in renewables has made nuclear power less attractive. That’s because there are cheaper and cleaner alternatives to building new nuclear plants. It’s not the same as keeping existing ones online for longer, but building new nuclear capacities is very expensive—at least twice as expensive as prolonging nuclear. But there’s also a catch here. Old reactors are more dangerous and need to be retrofitted to stay safe. The longer their lives are extended beyond their original design, the greater the risk that a piece of old equipment breaks. Countries like Japan have struggled to bring old reactors back online because they keep failing safety tests.
The Global Picture
Most new plants are popping up in Asia as demand for power skyrockets and countries like China commit to cutting emissions to net zero by 2060. This new generation of nuclear power stations is designed to higher standards of safety than previous reactors, based on lessons learned from the big disasters.
New nuclear plants in Asia are built with enhanced safety standards.
The Nuclear Waste Problem
What hasn’t changed is what to do when a plant closes down. Closing nuclear plants can make climate change worse if there aren’t renewables to pick up the slack. Extending their lifetime would mean retrofitting plants to make them safe, and building new ones costs a lot but could help stabilize clean electricity grids. But there’s one big question: what about nuclear waste?
It’s a big reason why so many people are against nuclear power in the first place. Spent fuel rods stay radioactive for tens of thousands of years, and it’s not only the rods—all the concrete and metal exposed to radiation can’t just be thrown away. Decommissioning a nuclear plant can take decades. But the problem is, even after 70 years of nuclear power generation, nobody has found a proven way to get rid of the waste for good. Some activists want to ban new plants until that problem is solved.
“Nuclear waste is something even nuclear advocates are sometimes unsure about. It’s toxic, radioactive, and in the wrong hands could even be used for radioactive or dirty bombs. All these things come together in high radioactive waste that needs to be kept out of the environment for roughly up to a million years. That is a real big challenge,” says John Harpercomp, a nuclear expert from Greenpeace Central Eastern Europe.
In 2019, a report by several German environmental non-profit organizations found that nuclear waste is being kept in short-term storage facilities for decades longer than planned. These temporary facilities were never designed to hold the waste for so long.
“That means that we leave this very difficult problem not to our grandchildren but to their children, and that’s a multi-generational problem that, in my opinion, has only one ethical answer: stop making that waste,” Harpercomp adds.
The industry solution for nuclear waste is to bury it deep underground, isolating the waste inside rock or clay to stop radiation reaching the surface. Finland is set to open the world’s first deep geological storage facility in 2023 to permanently deal with its waste.
Finland’s deep geological storage facility aims to safely contain nuclear waste.
“We think that deep in the Finnish bedrock, 450 meters deep in a kind of concrete pile, it’s the safest place to put them down there, and it’s always better there than in temporary storage on the ground level,” says a representative from the company designing the facility.
But if the site in Olkiluoto, western Finland, is the only one in the world and it hasn’t even been built yet, can we really trust that the technology will work forever? “Of course, if it hasn’t been started, there hasn’t been a prototype, but it has been tested. Even in Olkiluoto, we have been doing 30 years of research, and all kinds of possible leaks and things that might happen are considered,” the representative adds.
That might not convince environmentalists worried about contamination and even potential terror attacks in the distant future. But even they agree the idea needs research. The world already has half a century’s worth of nuclear waste to deal with.
So, Do We Need Nuclear Power?
So what does this all mean for us? Do we really need nuclear power to stop climate change? Well, it can certainly help. Nuclear is as safe as renewable energy in terms of lives lost and could balance out a clean energy mix—for example, when the wind’s not blowing or the sun’s not shining. Closing old plants is bad for the planet if it means burning more fossil fuels. But building new ones is expensive, and we still can’t be sure the waste won’t come back to hurt us in the future.
The nuclear power debate doesn’t have easy answers. It’s a complex issue that requires moving beyond lazy clichés. What role should nuclear play in our energy future? The answer depends on weighing the risks against the urgent need to combat climate change.
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