what the world got from COP28 was more like an endorsement of the status quo that reflects the ongoing state of play rather than accelerating it.
We must not allow broiling temperatures, more powerful storms, more frequent wildfires, and the disappearance of rain forests to become the new normal.
In Paris at the end of 2015, the world rejoiced when the national representatives from around the planet agreed to try really, really hard to keep average global temperatures from increasing more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Of course, in the 1800s when the Industrial Revolution began, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 300 parts per million. In 2015, carbon dioxide levels were on the verge of breaking the 400 ppm barrier. Today, with COP28 now in the rear view mirror, the world is experiencing carbon dioxide levels of 420 ppm.
In order for all the happy talk in 2015 to mean anything, CO2 levels should have been declining since then. The fact that they have risen instead means the promise of the Paris climate accords was a mirage. Pessimists at the time suggested the good news was an illusion and history, unfortunately, has proven those “the glass is half empty” types correct.
There was much celebrating in Dubai when the final communique from COP28 contained an historic phrase that proclaimed for the first time ever that the nations of the world should focus on “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” That is the first time in 28 tries that the words “fossil fuels” have been included in such a statement, which is pretty astonishing when you realize these annual events are about global warming. It has taken 28 years and millions of written and spoken words to acknowledge that fossil fuels are the problem. A young activist from India may have helped as well.
Sultan Al Jaber is being celebrated for getting those words into the final document after they were omitted from a prior draft and for standing up to his oil-soaked colleagues who felt betrayed by that language. But David Wallace-Wells, a science and climate writer for the New York Times, is not one of those who is cheering. In fact, he says what the world got from COP28 was more like an endorsement of the status quo that reflects the ongoing state of play rather than accelerating it.
Global sales of internal combustion engine vehicles peaked in 2017, he writes, and investment in renewable energy has exceeded investment in fossil fuel infrastructure for several years running. In 2022, 83 percent of new global energy capacity was green.
“The question isn’t about whether there will be a transition, but how fast, global and thorough it will be. The answer is: not fast or global or thorough enough yet, at least on the current trajectories, which COP28 effectively affirmed. To limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius now requires entirely eliminating emissions not long after 2040, according to the Global Carbon Project, whose ‘carbon budget’ for 1.5 degrees Celsius will be exhausted in about five years of current levels of emissions. For 1.7 degrees Celsius, it’s just after 2050, and for 2 degrees Celsius, 2080. And despite Al Jaber’s claim that COP28 has kept the 1.5 degree goal alive, hardly anyone believes it’s still plausible.”
In fact, Wallace-Wells writes, most analysts predict a global peak in fossil fuel emissions at some point over the next decade, followed not by a decline but a long plateau — meaning that in every year for the foreseeable future, we would be doing roughly as much damage to the future of the planet’s climate as was done in recent years. The expected result will be that by the end of this century, average global temperatures will have risen by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
“Not so long ago, this was a future that terrified us, but now we are not just coming to accept that future and, in some corners, applauding it as progress. Over the last several years, as decarbonization has made worst case scenarios seem much less likely, a wave of climate alarmism has given way somewhat to a new mix of accommodation and optimism.”
Imagining 3°C At COP28
At COP28, Bill Gates described anything below 3 degrees as a “fortunate” outcome. A few months earlier, former President Barack Obama struck a similar note in describing how he’d tried to talk his daughter Malia off the edge of climate despair by emphasizing what could still be saved rather than what had been lost already through global inaction. “We may not be able to cap temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, but here’s the thing, if we work really hard, we may be able to cap it at two and a half.” Scottish data scientist Hannah Ritchie gives a shot of optimism to those caught in a panic about warming and environmental degradation in a new book called “Not the End of the World.”
Wallace-Wells tries to remain guardedly optimistic but believes COP28 will be remembered as the moment the world finally gave up on the goal of limiting warming to degrees and encourages his readers to think what passing that threshold will mean.
“Global warming doesn’t proceed in large jumps, for the most part, and surpassing 1.5 degrees does not bring us immediately or inevitably to 2 degrees. But we know quite a lot about the difference between those two worlds — the one we had once hoped to achieve and the one that now looks much more likely. Indeed, in the recent past, a clear understanding of those differences was responsible for a period of intense and global climate alarm.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees Celsius,” published in 2018, collated all the scientific literature about the two warming levels. Between 1.5 and 2 degrees C, it estimated more than 150 million people will die prematurely from the air pollution produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Flooding events that used to arrive once a century will become annual events.
Most scientists believe that amount of warming would be a death sentence for the world’s coral reefs. And many believe that, in that range, the planet will lock in the permanent loss of many of its ice sheets, which could bring, over centuries, enough sea level rise to redraw the world’s coastlines.
If warming grows beyond those levels, so will its impacts. At 3 degrees, for instance, New York City could be hit by three 100 year flooding events each year and more than 50 times as many people in African cities would experience conditions of dangerous heat. Wildfires would burn twice as much land globally and the Amazon would cease to be a rain forest but become a grassland. Potentially lethal heat stress, almost unheard of at 1.5 degrees, would become routine for billions at 2 degrees, according to one recent study, and above 3 degrees would impact places like the American Midwest.
“In some ways, these projections may sound like old news, but as we find ourselves now adjusting to the possibility of a future shaped by temperature rise of that kind, it may be clarifying to recall that, almost certainly, when you first heard those projections, you were horrified. The era of climate reckoning has also been, to some degree, a period of normalization, and while there are surely reasons to move past apocalyptic politics toward something more pragmatic, one cost is a loss of perspective at negotiated, technocratic events like [COP28]”
Was 1.5°C Just An Attractive Fantasy?
Perhaps it was always somewhat fanciful to believe that it was possible to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Wallace-Wells suggests. As Bill McKibben said recently, simply stating the goal did a lot to shape action in the years that followed the Paris climate accords by demanding we all look squarely at what the science told us about what it would mean to fail.
The Dubai consensus that renewable energy should triple by 2030 is one sign that, in some areas, impressive change is possible. “But for all of our temperature goals, the timelines are growing shorter and shorter, bringing the world closer and closer to futures that looked so fearsome to so many not very long ago,” Wallace -Wells cautions.
The Takeaway
We must not allow broiling temperatures, more powerful storms, more frequent wildfires, and the disappearance of rain forests to become the new normal. We need to keep the vision that emerged in Paris in 2015 alive and intact, even if it was largely a fantasy. We need to keep the pressure on governments and fossil fuel companies to sharply reduce their carbon emissions by honoring the spirit as well as the letter of closing statement from COP28.
The struggle is far from over. Every tenth of a degree of increase in average global temperatures prevented will avoid untold suffering for millions of humans.
There is another consideration here. Much of the turn toward extreme right wing governments around the world from the United States to the Netherlands, Italy, New Zealand, and the UK is directly connected to a desire to keep black and brown people from becoming unwelcome immigrants. It is in the selfish best interest of wealthy nations to control climate related migration by controlling global temperature increases. If we think climate migration is rampant now, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Climate campaigners scoffed Saturday at a 22-nation pledge to triple nuclear power capacity by mid-century as a way to ward off the increasing damage of warming temperatures, with opponents calling it a costly and “dangerous” distraction from the urgent need for a fossil fuel phaseout alongside a rapid increase in more affordable and scaleable renewable sources such as wind and solar.
The Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy—backed by the United States, Canada, France, the Czech Republic, and others—was announced as part of the Climate Action Summit taking place in Dubai as a part of the two-week U.N. climate talks known as COP28.
While the document claims a “key role” for nuclear energy to keep “a 1.5°C limit on temperature rise within reach” by 2050 and to help attain the so-called “net-zero emissions” goal that governments and the fossil fuel industry deploy to justify the continued burning of coal, oil, and gas, critics say the false solution of atomic power actually harms the effort to reduce emissions by wasting precious time and money that could be spent better and faster elsewhere.
“There is no space for dangerous nuclear power to accelerate the decarbonization needed to achieve the Paris climate goal,” said Masayoshi Iyoda, a 350.org campaigner in Japan who cited the 2011 Fukushima disaster as evidence of the inherent dangers of nuclear power.
Nuclear energy, said Iyoda, “is nothing more than a dangerous distraction. The attempt of a ‘nuclear renaissance’ led by nuclear industries’ lobbyists since the 2000s has never been successful—it is simply too costly, too risky, too undemocratic, and too time-consuming. We already have cheaper, safer, democratic, and faster solutions to the climate crisis, and they are renewable energy and energy efficiency.”
When word of the multi-nation pledge emerged last month, Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and co-founder of The Solutions Project which offers a roadmap for 100% renewable energy that excludes nuclear energy, called the proposal the “stupidest policy proposal I’ve ever seen.”
Jacobson said the plan to boost nuclear capacity in a manner to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis “will never happen no matter how many goals are set” and added that President Joe Biden was getting “bad advice in the White House” for supporting it.
In comments from Dubai, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said that while nuclear is not “going to be the sweeping alternative to every other energy source,” he claimed that “science and the reality of facts” shows the world “you can’t get to net-zero 2050 without some nuclear.”
Numerous studies and blueprints towards a renewable energy future, however, have shown this is not established fact, but rather the position taken by both the nuclear power industry itself and those who would otherwise like to slow the transition to a truly renewable energy system.
Pauline Boyer, energy transition campaign manager with Greenpeace France, said the scientific evidence is clear and it is not in favor of a surge in nuclear power.
“If we wish to maintain a chance of a trajectory of 1.5°C, we must massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the coming years, but nuclear power is too slow to deploy in the face of the climate emergency,” she said.
“The announcement of a tripling of capacities is disconnected from reality,” Boyer continued. Citing delays and soaring costs, she said the nuclear industry “is losing ground in the global energy mix every day” in favor of renewable energy options that are cheaper, quicker to deploy, and more accessible to developing countries.
In 2016, researchers at the University of Sussex and the Vienna School of International Studies showed that “entrenched commitments to nuclear power” were likely “counterproductive” towards achieving renewable energy targets, especially as “better ways to meet climate goals”—namely solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower–were suppressed.
In response to Saturday’s announcement, Soraya Fettih, a 350.org campaigner from France, which relies heavily on nuclear power, said it’s simply a move in the wrong direction. “Investing now in nuclear energy is an inefficient route to take to reduce emissions at the scale and pace needed to tackle climate change,” said Fettih. “Nuclear energy takes much longer than renewable energy to be operational.”
Writing on the subject in 2019, Harvard University professor Naomi Oreskes and renowned author and psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton observed how advocates of nuclear power declare the technology “clean, efficient, economical, and safe” while in reality “it is none of these. It is expensive and poses grave dangers to our physical and psychological well-being.”
“There are now more than 450 nuclear reactors throughout the world,” they wrote at the time. “If nuclear power is embraced as a rescue technology, there would be many times that number, creating a worldwide chain of nuclear danger zones—a planetary system of potential self-annihilation.”
Nuclear energy made a big splash at the COP28 climate meeting in Dubai with a declaration by 22 countries calling for a tripling of nuclear energy by 2050. It seems like an impressive and urgent call to arms. On closer inspection, however, the numbers don’t work out. Even at best, a shift to invest more heavily in nuclear energy over the next two decades could actually worsen the climate crisis, as cheaper, quicker alternatives are ignored for more expensive, slow-to-deploy nuclear options.
Here’s what the numbers say:
22: That 22 countries signed the declaration may seem like a lot of support, but 31 countries (plus Taiwan) currently produce nuclear energy. Notably missing from the declaration are Russia and the People’s Republic of China. Russia is the world’s leading exporter of nuclear power plants and has the fourth largest nuclear energy capacity globally; China has built the most nuclear power plants of any country in the last two decades and ranks third globally in capacity. Thirteen other countries that have key nuclear programs are also missing from the declaration: five in Europe (Armenia, Belarus, Belgium, Switzerland and Spain), two in South Asia (India and Pakistan) three in the Americas (Argentina, Brazil and Mexico), South Africa (the only nuclear energy producer in Africa), and Iran.
5: Five of the countries signing the declaration do not have nuclear power—Mongolia, Morocco, Ghana, Moldova, and Poland. Only Poland’s electricity grid can support three or four large nuclear reactors—the rest would have to invest billions of dollars first to expand their grids or rely on smaller reactors that would not overwhelm grid capacity. Poland wants to replace its smaller coal plants with almost 80 small modular reactors (SMRs), but these “paper reactors” are largely just plans and not yet proven technology. One American vendor, NuScale, recently scrapped a six-unit project when cost estimates rose exponentially. In any event, none of these five countries is likely to make a significant contribution toward tripling nuclear energy in the next 20 years.
17: The 17 remaining signatories to the nuclear energy declaration represent a little more than half of all countries with nuclear energy, raising the issue of how much support there really is for tripling nuclear energy by 2050.
3x: The idea of tripling nuclear energy to meet climate change requirements is not new. In fact, it was one of eight climate stabilization “wedges” laid out in Science magazine in 2004 in a now-famous article by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala of Princeton University. A stabilization wedge would avoid one billion tons of carbon emissions per year by 2055. In the case of nuclear energy, this would require building 700 large nuclear reactors over the course of 50 years. (In 2022, there were 416 reactors operating around the world, with 374 gigawatts-electric of capacity). In 2005, to reach the one-billion-ton goal of emissions reduction would have meant building 14 reactors per year, assuming all existing reactors continued operating. (In fact, the build rate needed to be 23 per year to replace aging reactors that would need to be retired.) Given the stagnation of the nuclear power industry since then, the build rate now to reach wedge level would need to be 40 per year.
10: Average annual number of connections of nuclear power plants to the electricity grid, per year, over the entire history of nuclear energy. Between 2011 and 2021, however, the average annual number of nuclear power reactors connected to the grid was 5.
42 GWe: New nuclear energy capacity added from 2000 to 2020.
605 GWe: New wind capacity added from 2000 to 2020.
578 GWe: New solar capacity added from 2000 to 2020. Growth in renewables has vastly outpaced that of nuclear energy in recent years.
10: Average annual number of connections of nuclear power plants to the electricity grid, per year, over the entire history of nuclear energy. Between 2011 and 2021, however, the average annual number of nuclear power reactors connected to the grid was 5.
42 GWe: New nuclear energy capacity added from 2000 to 2020.
605 GWe: New wind capacity added from 2000 to 2020.
578 GWe: New solar capacity added from 2000 to 2020. Growth in renewables has vastly outpaced that of nuclear energy in recent years.
15 trillion: In US dollars, the cost to build enough NuScale reactors (9,738 77 megawatt-electric reactors) to triple nuclear energy capacity, assuming existing reactors continue to operate. There are less expensive SMRs, perhaps, but none further along in the US licensing process.
13: An unlucky number in some cultures, but this was the time from design to projected operation of the NuScale VOYGR plant. Nuclear power plants have to be “done right,” and cutting corners to speed deployment is in no one’s interests. The design-and-build phase for a country’s first nuclear reactor, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, is 15 years. If the great expansion of nuclear energy is supposed to occur in more than the 22 countries that signed the declaration, this lead-time cannot be ignored.
The climate crisis is real, but nuclear energy will continue to be the most expensive and slowest option to reach net zero emissions, no matter how you cook the numbers.
“Cop28 is the fossil fuel industry’s dream outcome, because it looks like progress, but it isn’t.”
While the agreement’s call for the need to transition away from fossil fuels is welcome, it has numerous caveats and loopholes that risks rendering it meaningless.
Climate experts say lack of unambiguous statement is ‘tragedy for the planet and our future’
The failure of Cop28 to call for a phase-out of fossil fuels is “devastating” and “dangerous” given the urgent need for action to tackle the climate crisis, scientists have said.
One called it a “tragedy for the planet and our future” while another said it was the “dream outcome” for the fossil fuel industry.
The UN climate summit ended on Wednesday with a compromise deal that called for a “transition away” from fossil fuels. The stronger term “phase-out” had been backed by 130 of the 198 countries negotiating in Dubai but was blocked by petrostates including Saudi Arabia.
The deal was hailed as historic as it was the first citing of fossil fuels, the root cause of the climate crisis, in 30 years of climate negotiations. But scientists said the agreement contained many loopholes and did not match the severity of the climate emergency.
“The lack of an agreement to phase out fossil fuels was devastating,” said Prof Michael Mann, a climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania in the US. “To ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best. It’s like promising your doctor that you will ‘transition away from doughnuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes.”
Dr Magdalena Skipper, the editor in chief of the science journal Nature, said: “The science is clear – fossil fuels must go. World leaders will fail their people and the planet unless they accept this reality.”
An editorial in Nature said the failure over the phase-out was “more than a missed opportunity”, it was “dangerous” and ran “counter to the core goals laid down in the 2015 Paris climate agreement” of limiting global heating to 1.5C (2.7F) above preindustrial levels.
“The climate doesn’t care who emits greenhouse gases,” the editorial continued. “There is only one viable path forward, and that is for everybody to phase out almost all fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”
Sir David King, the chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group and a former UK chief scientific adviser, said: “The wording of the deal is feeble. Ensuring 1.5C remains viable will require total commitment to a range of far-reaching measures, including full fossil fuel phase-out.”
There was a chasm between the stark statement of the emissions cuts needed and the action proposed to deliver those reductions, he said: “The Cop28 text recognises there is a need for ‘deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions’ to stay in line with 1.5C. But then it lists a whole bunch of efforts that don’t have a chance of achieving that.”
The scientists said the loopholes included the call to “accelerate” carbon capture and storage to trap emissions from burning fossil fuels, an option that can play a minor role at best.
Dr Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London, said: “Until fossil fuels are phased out, the world will continue to become a more dangerous, more expensive and more uncertain place to live. With every vague verb, every empty promise in the final text, millions more people will enter the frontline of climate change and many will die.”
Prof Martin Siegert, a polar scientist and deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Exeter, said: “The science is perfectly clear. Cop28, by not making a clear declaration to stop fossil fuel burning is a tragedy for the planet and our future. The world is heating faster and more powerfully than the Cop response to deal with it.”
Prof Mike Berners-Lee, an expert on carbon footprinting at Lancaster University, said: “Cop28 is the fossil fuel industry’s dream outcome, because it looks like progress, but it isn’t.”
Dr Elena Cantarello, a senior lecturer in sustainability science at Bournemouth University, UK, said: “It is hugely disappointing to see how a very small number of countries have been able to put short-term national interests ahead of the future of people and nature.”
The president of COP28 is styling this as a moment in history. The point at which the world changed course and began to really bear down on the overwhelming source of the emissions warming our planet: coal, oil and gas. And it really is significant progress that for the first time fossil fuels and the need to “transition” away from them has been included in the text.
Campaigners will say it is too little too late. But the world coming together to acknowledge that fact will have consequences in the real world. Would you want to bet your life savings on a new coal-fired power plant after today?
But it is true that the agreement is fundamentally weak. Why? Because the strongest language the UAE could get the world to agree was to “call on parties to contribute” to a series of actions to tackle climate change.
The president of the Cop28 climate summit will continue with his oil company’s record investment in oil and gas production, despite coordinating a global deal to “transition away” from fossil fuels. Sultan Al Jaber, who is also the chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ national oil and gas company, Adnoc, told the Guardian the company had to satisfy demand for fossil fuels.
I too wish that the things that the nuclear industry says about itself were true—I wish it was green and renewable. I wish that there weren’t multiple uranium mining sites around the world with thousands of tons of uranium tailings abandoned and open to the elements, continuing to harm the health of generations born long after mining ceased.
I wish that it didn’t take immense, carbon-intensive mining projects to extract uranium from the Earth, and then again to “deposit” the spent nuclear fuel from reactors back half a kilometer underground.
BY ROBERT JACOBS 9 July 21, Bhaskar Sunkara’s recent opinion piece extoling the virtues of nuclear power and castigating its opponents as paranoid and ill-informed, is clearly motivated by his deep concerns over the dire impacts of global warming, which loom closer by the hour. Unfortunately, his arguments amount to little more than regurgitated industry talking points, in their traditional form of a Jeremiad.
First, Sunkara poses the decline of the nuclear industry in the West as an achievement of progressive political movements. Specifically, he cites the decline of nuclear power in Germany as attributable to a “Green party-spearheaded campaign.” This decline has been more reasonably ascribed to both market conditions and missteps by nuclear industry giants such as Westinghouse and AREVA. From its inception, nuclear power has been heavily dependent on government subsidies to appear economically viable (subsidies such as insurance and the disposal of waste largely configured as taxpayer burdens).
Rather than succumbing to its political opponents on the left, the industry has been sunk by its structural economic dysfunctions. In the US, this has sparked schemes to secure additional taxpayer subsidies in legislative fixes such as guaranteed returns for nuclear utilities, and outright bribery of legislators for taxpayer bailouts of failing companies.
The most simplistic recitation of nuclear industry talking points is when Sunkara dismisses concerns about nuclear waste, and extolls the mythic separation between “civilian” and “military” nuclear technologies. He asserts that most nuclear waste “can be recycled to generate more electricity,” an assertion that goes back more than half a century and has been ritualistically recited by an army of nuclear industry PR professionals before him…yet here we are 50 years later and very little spent nuclear fuel has actually been recycled. The most successful nuclear recycling nation is France which, nevertheless, is experiencing a “nuclear exit” and is unlikely to ever use this recycled fuel. AREVA, the French nuclear giant, has gone bankrupt. Reprocessing facilities like the Rokkasho plant here in Japan have never functioned properly, unless you consider their role enabling the stockpiling of plutonium by Japan to hedge against future weapon needs to be an elemental goal.
There is a difference between what can be done, and what actually happens. Rather than being recycled, hundreds of thousands of metric tons of spent nuclear fuel await “final disposal” in deep geological repositories. Some have been waiting for over 70 years. Just last week, a panel advising the EU on categorizing nuclear plant as “green” energy, and thus eligible to receive EU funding as a “sustainable investment,” concluded that the problems of nuclear waste preclude that designation.
I would point out that even though plastics manufacturers assure us that most plastic can be recycled, we still seem to be living a world with ever increasing amounts of plastic waste. Their greenwashing has not eventuated in a world full of plastics made from recycled materials. The market reality is that it is cheaper to manufacture new plastic than it is to manufacture plastic from recycled materials. Similarly, it is cheaper to discard spent nuclear fuel than it is to reprocess it.
Sunkara dismisses the irrevocable link between military and civilian nuclear technologies as imaginary. First, let’s consider the present imbrication. A 2019 Atlantic Council study places the value of the US civilian nuclear complex to the US national security apparatus at $26 billion annually simply in terms of the human capital assets: “In terms of nuclear technology innovation, export capacity, and geopolitics, a vibrant civilian nuclear energy sector is a critically important national security asset.”
However, the civilian operation of nuclear power plants also places future generations at military risk. I have written that, historically, nuclear reactors were “born violent.” That is to say, they were invented by the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s to manufacture plutonium for use in nuclear weapons, and were instrumental in killing almost 100,000 people in 1945. The “first” American commercial atomic plant in Shippingport, PA that went critical in 1958, was actually the 14th industrial nuclear reactor built in the United States, the other 13 only manufactured plutonium, which by then formed the fissile cores of thousands of nuclear weapons.
In nuclear reactors used to make electricity, this plutonium is not separated out for use in weapons. However, all nuclear power plants remain plutonium production factories. The fact that most of those tons of plutonium remain in the spent fuel rods does not mean they will stay there forever. Thousands of years from now, some government or military may dig up the spent fuel in our deep geological repositories and separate that plutonium out to build nuclear weaponry. All it would take is the technology (technology we currently possess) and the will. We continue to manufacture that plutonium—perhaps for them to weaponize. Every nuclear power plant that operates adds to that inventory; more than 99% of existing plutonium was manufactured in nuclear reactors. In 1962, the US successfully detonated a nuclear weapon assembled with just such “reactor-grade” plutonium. Our generation’s use of nuclear power silently stockpiles fissile material that will remain militarily viable for millennia.
I too wish that the things that the nuclear industry says about itself were true—I wish it was green and renewable. I wish that there weren’t multiple uranium mining sites around the world with thousands of tons of uranium tailings abandoned and open to the elements, continuing to harm the health of generations born long after mining ceased. I wish that it didn’t take immense, carbon-intensive mining projects to extract uranium from the Earth, and then again to “deposit” the spent nuclear fuel from reactors back half a kilometer underground. Estimates before construction began at Onkalo spent fuel repository in Finland were that the site would entail a “half-billion-euro construction project will generate some 2,500 person years of employment,” and would take 100 years to complete. That is just to contain the spent fuel from five nuclear power plants. The United States, by contrast, has 94 commercial nuclear power plants. There is still no actual plan for the astonishingly large and carbon-intensive site it will take to bury the more than 140,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel, with some hope of containing it for thousands of generations of future human beings. This doesn’t include the thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel from the nuclear reactors operated by the US military to provide the fissile cores of more than 70,000 nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
The panic-inducing impacts of anthropic climate change spark a desperate need for immediate reassurance and calming: we want to fix it now. We long to turn some corner that will change the situation. It is unlikely that the same short-sighted military-industrial technophilia that brought us to this climate crisis will flip over and provide us the urgent path to its resolution. Technological evangelists have been auditioning for the part of Climate Change Savior to anyone who will listen. Some proffer a Reagan-era Star Wars pitch: they will fill the skies with material to block the enemy (in this case sunlight rather than Soviet ICBMs). These geoengineering quick-fix schemes are more likely to cause unplanned outcomes than to achieve their missions.
At one time nuclear weapon producers imagined they too could geoengineer the planet to shape it to human desires. They tested the use of nuclear weapons to sculpt harbors into coastlines, and to release natural gas trapped in rock formations. These experiments led to some of the most significant radiological distributions and contaminated sites in the wide panoply of nuclear testing. Still, hyper-capitalist techno utopians like Elon Musk envision the key to human habitation on Mars is the detonation of a massive arsenals of thermonuclear weapons to shape it to our needs.
The nuclear industry will ignore its market dilemmas as long as taxpayers continue to backstop its investors. However, to believe that this massive, for-profit, military-based industry has concern for the welfare of the Earth and its inhabitants is akin to believing the plastic industry is actually beavering away to make the plastic waste disappear. Repackaging their talking points out of a genuine concern for living creatures is a resource they will continue to tap so long as it flows freely. Sunkara would do better to advocate for the mass social movements that have shifted giant industries towards social welfare in the past rather than preaching that the industries themselves are saviors. Time is obviously short, wrong turns are catastrophic.
Yes. More than what people expect. [Ref. 2 – Year 2021]
Quote:
“How climate-friendly is nuclear compared to other energies?
If the entire life cycle of a nuclear plant is included in the calculation, nuclear energy certainly comes out ahead of fossil fuels like coal or natural gas. But the picture is drastically different when compared with renewable energy.”
“According to new but still unpublished data from the state-run German Environment Agency (UBA) as well as the WISE figures, nuclear power releases 3.5 times more CO2 per kilowatt-hour than photovoltaic solar panel systems. Compared with onshore wind power, that figure jumps to 13 times more CO2. When up against electricity from hydropower installations, nuclear generates 29 times more carbon.”
Why does the IAEA state otherwise? It’s convenient, as simple as that.
IAEA statement at COP28: on Dec. 1st, 2023 [Ref. 1]
Fact check: Is nuclear energy good for the climate? NATURE AND ENVIRONMENTGLOBAL ISSUES. Joscha Weber. November 29, 2021. Supporters of nuclear energy say it can help us wean our economies off polluting fossil fuels. No surprise, it’s a heated issue. But what about the facts? Can nuclear power really help save the climate?
No. Nuclear energy is also responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, no energy source is completely free of emissions, but more on that later.
“When it comes to nuclear, uranium extraction, transport and processing produces emissions. The long and complex construction process of nuclear power plants also releases CO2, as does the demolition of decommissioned sites. And, last but not least, nuclear waste also has to be transported and stored under strict conditions — here, too, emissions must be taken into account.”
“How much CO2 does nuclear power produce?
Results vary significantly, depending on whether we only consider the process of electricity generation, or take into account the entire life cycle of a nuclear power plant. A report released in 2014 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, estimated a range of 3.7 to 110 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt-hour (kWh).
“It’s long been assumed that nuclear plants generate an average of 66 grams of CO2/kWh — though Wealer believes the actual figure is much higher. New power plants, for example, generate more CO2 during construction than those built in previous decades, due to stricter safety regulations.”
Studies that include the entire life cycle of nuclear power plants, from uranium extraction to nuclear waste storage, are rare, with some researchers pointing out that data is still lacking. In one life cycle study, the Netherlands-based World Information Service on Energy (WISE) calculated that nuclear plants produce 117 grams of CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour
“Could we rely on nuclear energy to help stop global warming?
Around the world, nuclear energy representatives, as well as some politicians, have called for the expansion of atomic power. In Germany, for example, the right-wing populist AfD party has backed nuclear power plants, calling them “modern and clean.” The AfD has called for a return to the energy source, which Germany has pledged to phase out completely by the end of 2022.
Other countries have also supported plans to build new nuclear plants, arguing that the energy sector will be even more damaging for the climate without it. But Wealer from Berlin’s Technical University, along with numerous other energy experts, sees takes a different view.
“The contribution of nuclear energy is viewed too optimistically,” he said. “In reality, [power plant] construction times are too long and the costs too high to have a noticeable effect on climate change. It takes too long for nuclear energy to become available.”
“Nuclear power plants are about four times as expensive as wind or solar, and take five times as long to build,” he said. “When you factor it all in, you’re looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant.””
“He pointed out that the world needed to get greenhouse gases under control within a decade. “And in the next 10 years, nuclear power won’t be able to make a significant contribution,” added Schneider.
“Nuclear power is not being considered at the current time as one of the key global solutions to climate change,” said Antony Froggatt, deputy director of the environment and society program at the international affairs think tank Chatham House in London.
He said a combination of excessive costs, environmental consequences and lack of public support were all arguments against nuclear power.”
COP28 fossil fuel pledges will not limit global warming to 1.5C, says IEA. Summit president Sultan al-Jaber’s plans to reduce climate goals’ gap ‘not good enough’, warns energy agency’s chief.
Emissions-cutting pledges made by about 130 countries and 50 fossil fuel companies at the start of the UN climate summit will still leave the world far off track in limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, according to an analysis from the International Energy Agency.
Together, the countries account for more than half of the world’s gross domestic product, the agency said. The IEA has calculated that full implementation of a set of measures that are part of a new global decarbonisation alliance would only reduce the energy-related emissions gap between the current trajectory and a 1.5°C scenario by about a third by 2030.
Changing ambient temperatures are already posing serious risks to nuclear plants across the world. Nuclear regulators cannot wait until sea-level rise coupled with storm surges begin impacting operational safety of their plants—they must act now.
Note: This is part two of a two-part blog series on the impacts of climate change on nuclear power plants. Check out our first blog post on the impact of increasing ambient temperatures.
Climate action isn’t simply about reducing emissions—it’s also about addressing local environmental concerns and minimizing risks to human health and safety. With that in mind, if nuclear power is going to have a role in addressing climate change, stronger safety and environmental regulations will be needed.
Unfortunately, this approach is missing from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which in January voted in a 3-to-2 decision to water down recommendations from its own staff to reevaluate seismic and flooding hazards at nuclear sites. “This decision is nonsensical,” Commissioner Jeff Baran wrote in his dissent, “Instead of requiring nuclear power plants to be prepared for the actual flooding and earthquake hazards that could occur at their sites, NRC will allow them to be prepared only for the old, outdated hazards typically calculated decades ago when the science of seismology and hydrology was far less advanced than it is today.”
The January ruling came almost eight years after staff scientists released a list of recommendations in direct response to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown. With the approval (and pending approvals) this year to rollback multiple safety regulations , the U.S. nuclear fleet, the oldest in the world, cannot afford to wait another decade to strengthen safety and environmental regulations in preparation of climate change–in this case, rising sea levels.
What are the Risks?
Nuclear power plants require huge amounts of water to prevent fission products in the core and spent nuclear fuel from overheating (incidentally making nuclear the most water intensive energy source in terms of consumption and withdrawal per unit of energy delivered). That’s why over 40 percent of the world’s nuclear plants are built along the coasts, with that number rising to 66 percent for just plants under construction. Unable to run on the electricity it generates itself to power the pumps that provide cooling water to the core and to the spent nuclear fuel stored onsite, a nuclear plant must rely on the grid or backup generators to ensure cooling water circulation. Any hazard that cuts off access to those sources of power restricts access to cooling water, ultimately risking a nuclear meltdown and off-site release of radiation, as happened during the flooding of Fukushima.
Flooding evaluations conducted by the NRC concluded that 55 of the 61 evaluated U.S. nuclear sites experienced flooding hazards beyond what they were designed to handle. Even more alarming, in 2014, the flood barriers at Florida Power & Light’s St. Lucie Nuclear Plant–one of the few plants reported to be prepared for disaster but which had been missing proper seals for decades–gave way to 50,000 gallons of water after heavy rainfall.
Storm surges like the one at St. Lucie Nuclear plant and extreme weather events, as witnessed in Fukushima, pose very real risks to both operational and decommissioned plants, almost all of which (in the US) will continue to store nuclear waste onsite for decades until a permanent storage solution is found. Coupled with increasingly rising sea-levels, these risks will continue to grow. Even under a very low scenario of 1°C warming by midcentury, the 2018 U.S. National Climate Assessment reports that the “frequency, depth, and extent of both high tide and more severe, damaging coastal flooding will increase rapidly in the coming decades.” And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that 1.5°C of warming could be reached in as little as 11 years.
While all energy technologies will be impacted in some way by the increasing severity of natural disasters and sea level rise, the failure of nuclear power plants can result in irreversible health and environmental consequences on top of social and economic damages, including worst of all the release of radiation that can remain lethal for thousands of years. Under government estimates, the Fukushima meltdown resulted in the displacement of 165,000 people, cleanup and compensation costs of up to $200 billion, and a timeline of 30 to 40 years. Experts say, however, that true costs could reach $500 billion and decontamination timelines could be underestimated by decades.
Nuclear in East Asia
Despite initial vocal opposition from the public in many East Asian countries that have slowed down nuclear buildout after Fukushima, the direction of government policies for nuclear development in East Asia remain mostly unchanged, and have simply resulted in rather a more conservative, moderate pace. In fact, this pace has sustained much of nuclear development in East Asia, home to many countries that have found nuclear power as an attractive solution to addressing the dilemma between achieving energy security for an increasing population and decarbonizing to mitigate global climate change.
Of the 56 nuclear power plants currently in construction around the world, 33 of them are in Asia; 16 in China alone. As observed in the graph below, [on original] if all nuclear units that are currently under construction reach completion, East Asia is slated to become the region with the largest number of operating nuclear power plants, 93 percent of which will reside along the coast.
What is alarming is that East Asia and the Pacific region is uniquely vulnerable to sea-level rise. A 2015 report by Climate Central found that of the top 10 countries most likely to be affected sea level rise for 4°C warming, seven are in Asia. Similarly, in a study by the World Bank, China and Indonesia will be the most vulnerable to permanent inundation. Given the heightened flooding risks in Asia, strengthening the authority of regulatory structures that oversee the safety of nuclear build out will be increasingly important.
What’s the Plan?
Fukushima was a lesson to the global community that even one of the world’s most technologically advanced and experienced countries can fail to prevent a nuclear meltdown. To prepare for the realities of rising sea levels that pose unique risks to different nuclear plants, regulators must require climate adaptation plans and heightened safety oversight. Nonetheless, at the international scale, not much work is being done to address these sea-level rise concerns.
The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), in recognizing that the “world is ill-prepared for the risks from a changing climate,” conducted a study on the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to climate change, which is not yet available to the public. Since 2014, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has begun to include a section about the impacts of climate change on nuclear energy in its annual Climate and Nuclear Power Report. Yet even as these international organizations detail the many hazards changing climate poses to nuclear reactors, preventative and/or adaptation measures do not seem to be prioritized or encouraged, especially for existing nuclear plants.
“Outside of their Scope” at Home
Similar attitudes are held here in the U.S. Perched at the southern tip of Florida, the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station is seeking to be the first U.S. nuclear plant permitted to run for 80 years. Initially refusing to consider sea-level rise in the environmental review of the license extension, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) released a revised draft this year, only to come to the following conclusion: It’s outside of the scope of the agency.
If new information about changing environmental conditions (such as rising sea levels that threaten safe operating conditions or challenge compliance with the plant’s technical specifications) becomes available, the NRC will evaluate the new information to determine if any safety-related changes are needed at licensed nuclear power plants,” the NRC report said.
The report arrives at this conclusion by utilizing lower-bound sea level rise estimates from the 2018 U.S. Climate Change assessment, rationalizing that the report “assigns very high confidence to the lower bounds of these projections and medium confidence to the upper bounds.” As highlighted by this Bloomberg analysis released this year, nuclear plant operators are not only allowed to perform their own flood risk estimates but are also able to decide what assumptions are made, with review from the NRC.
The uncertainty that comes with sea-level rise projections obviously exists. In securing the safety of such critical infrastructure, however, using the highest sea-level rise estimates is the only way to ensure that all actions that can be taken against a potential threat are taken. On the other hand, relying on the lowest storm surge estimates is akin to receiving a warning about a potential threat, and taking the bare minimum actions to prepare for it.
Changing ambient temperatures are already posing serious risks to nuclear plants across the world. Nuclear regulators cannot wait until sea-level rise coupled with storm surges begin impacting operational safety of their plants—they must act now. With the world’s scientists calling attention to the climate crisis ahead of us, action must be taken to ensure nuclear plants are part of the solution, not the problem.
This factsheet analyzes the role of nuclear energy in global climate scenarios. It shows that a global tripling of nuclear capacity until 2050 is neither realistic nor is it needed to achieve climate targets according to the Paris agreement.
The factsheet presents an analysis of nine global climate scenarios that achieve climate targets according to the Paris agreement as well as two non-target scenarios with an emphasis on the role of nuclear energy.
In order to assess how realistic these top-down scenarios are, it compares these figures with the plans and programs of governments for the expansion (or phase out) of nuclear power.
A tripling of today’s nuclear capacity of 370 GW would require 1.110 GW net electrical capacity to be operational in 2050. If we assume a very high sixty year lifetime for all nuclear reactors in operation and under construction today, roughly 210 GW of the current nuclear fleet would still be online in 2050.
Thus, a total of nearly 900 GW would have to be constructed additionally between 2024 and 2050. Assuming a linear increase in the rate of new construction up to 2050, starting with the amount of new nuclear connected to the grid in 2023, in 2050 more than 60 GW would need to be connected to the grid to meet the tripling nuclear target, compare Figure 10.
This would be approximately twice the maximum historic capacity connected to the grid in a single year. On average, more new capacity would have to be added every year over 25 years as was the case at the historical maximum in 1985. From these numbers, it is evident, that a tripling of nuclear capacity until 2050 is neither realistic nor is it needed to achieve climate targets according to the Paris agreement.
Negotiations on how the world can slash greenhouse gas emissions and stave off the worst impacts of the climate crisis will reach a fresh intensity over the next few days, with nations wrangling over whether to phase out or phase down fossil fuels.
For the remaining five negotiating days of the Cop28 UN climate summit in Dubai ministers will hold a series of meetings to try to break the impasse and present a text that sets out a roadmap for staying within a rise of 1.5C of global heating above preindustrial levels.
Simon Stiell, the UN climate chief, told countries: “Now all governments must give their negotiators clear marching orders – we need highest ambition, not point-scoring or lowest common denominator politics. Good intentions won’t halve emissions this decade or save lives right now.”
At COP28, many major players are banding together to plan a big ramp-up of nuclear power. But without China’s help, is the target realistic?
COP28 might be remembered as the “nuclear COP.”
More than 20 countries including the U.S., France, Japan and the United Kingdom have pledged to triple global nuclear energy generation by 2050 at the launch of COP28 in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, the world’s annual climate summit.
John Kerry, former U.S. secretary of state and President Biden’s climate envoy, made the case for nuclear energy during the event’s launch ceremonies, saying that the science has proven “you can’t get to net-zero 2050 without some nuclear.”
While there are important methane, climate-finance and environmental-justice initiatives being hammered out at the conference, the nuclear goal stands out as a bit of a policy departure compared to previous COP meetings. Nuclear has received little attention at past COPs due to its cost challenges and lingering controversies surrounding its safety and other issues.
There’s another reason for this being considered the nuclear COP: The United Arab Emirates, COP28’s host, is on the verge of completing the second nuclear facility in the Middle East, which will provide one-quarter of the country’s electricity. Construction on the power plant began in 2012, and the last of its four 1.4-gigawatt reactors at the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant has just received its operating license from regulators.
The leaders spearheading COP28’s ramped-up nuclear targets are heeding the prescriptions set forth in many major climate-change models, including the International Energy Agency’s, which call for massive growth in global nuclear energy capacity in order to have a chance of meeting net-zero goals and keeping global warming in check. (However, there are certainly opposing models showing a path to zero emissions without a significant scale-up of nuclear power.)
Today’s global fleet of approximately 440 nuclear reactors has a combined capacity of around 400 gigawatts — enough that nuclear energy provides about 10 percent of the world’s power. But less than a paltry 4 gigawatts of nuclear energy has been connected to the grid in 2023. The global solar industry is forecast to install more than 400 gigawatts of capacity in 2023 alone.
The goal of tripling the world’s nuclear output would require deploying an average of 40 gigawatts of nuclear power every year through 2050, according to the World Nuclear Association. (My back-of-the-envelope calculations point to an even higher number if replacing existing aged-out equipment is included in the mix.)
The COP28 declaration includes language about nuclear’s contribution in keeping a 1.5°C limit on temperature rise within reach and its energy-security benefits, as well as the claim that paring down the world’s nuclear power would make reaching net zero more difficult and costly. Nuclear’s potential role in hard-to-abate sectors such as hydrogen production and petrochemical processing is also highlighted.
The pledge also asks the signees to consider smaller and more innovative reactor designs in their grid planning and makes an appeal that they continue to maintain the existing reactor fleet, extending its lifetime if feasible and safe.
Over the past few decades, the hefty price tag of building nuclear plants has been the industry’s Achilles’ heel. This poses particular challenges in market-based economies, where periods of high interest rates and inflation threaten the viability of mega projects, be they offshore wind, high-speed rail — or nuclear reactors.
Importantly, the COP28 declaration looks to address some of these financial flaws and invites the World Bank and other regional and international banks to include nuclear energy in their lending policies.
Ironically absent from the pool of signees is China, the only country with any real chance of meeting the COP goal. China aims to double its nuclear energy capacity by 2035 and is well on its way; as of this year, 22 nuclear plants are under construction in China with more than 70 planned.
But while the U.S. saw its first newly built nuclear reactor in decades reach commercial operation this year in Vogtle 3 and could see Vogtle 4 go online next year, you’d be hard-pressed to find an American nuclear expert willing to predict when the next reactor will be up and running.
Confronting climate change requires bold, large-scale action — and tripling nuclear generation certainly qualifies in that regard. But before overestimating the influence or significance of the COP28 nuclear pledge, I would challenge you to name COP27’s or COP26’s theme.
Still, government agencies such as the U.S. Office of Nuclear Energy and a growingteam of younginfluencers are understandably enthusiastic about nuclear’s spotlight and the aspirational growth targets unveiled at COP28. Perhaps the emphasis on nuclear at this year’s meeting reinforces the idea that we’re in the midst of a generational shift in sentiment about atomic power.
With five days left at COP28, the jury is still out on whether this year’s UN climate talks will achieve real progress to address climate change. But one thing is clear: the spotlight is on nuclear power. The (so-called) low-carbon fuel has received an unprecedented amount of attention at this year’s gathering, with nearly two dozen countries including the US, UK, and United Arab Emirates signing a declaration over the weekend to triple nuclear energy by mid-century.
Whether the world can deliver on these nuclear promises is questionable — the sector is notorious for high construction costs and lengthy project timelines, not to mention hazardous waste. Despite the hype around the fuel in recent years, global nuclear power generation declined 4 per cent year over year in 2022 to its lowest level in four decades, according to a new World Nuclear Industry report, calling the COP28 target “highly unrealistic”.
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