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

LIT HUB, By M.V. Ramana, July 29, 2024

M.V. Ramana Debunks Some Common Arguments About Energy In an Era of Ecological Emergency

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…………………………..

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.

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……………………………………………

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……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

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.

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

July 31, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized