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One of the keys to a smooth transition to a green economy is nuclear power. It’s a proven alternative to fossil fuels—but the most important barriers to its adoption may not be what you think.
To reach net zero, electricity grids all over the world need to be powered by low carbon sources. Wind and solar power is producing more electricity every year, but their output is patchy and doesn’t always match demand. However, there is a more reliable option.
What is nuclear power’s role in the green future?
It’s hard to think of anything more important to all of our futures than reducing carbon emissions. It’s a big job and it needs to be done quickly if we’re going to avoid the consequences of catastrophic global warming and climate change. Hal, I know you’ve been writing about where we are with nuclear power. What’s preventing this from building loads of nuclear plants to take up the slack here? Is the problem mainly technical? Is it mainly economic?
Nuclear power would be a lovely thing to have a lot of, right, it’s, you know, it’s incredibly low carbon, it’s just as low carbon as solar panels and wind farms, once you take into account building the things and making all of the stuff that goes into them. It’s incredibly safe compared to all of the fossil fuels, because it doesn’t emit particulate pollution which causes respiratory disease. Ostensibly, (a) very very useful form of clean, carbon-free and firm, very important, power that doesn’t change; if you look at the British grid, it’s got lots and lots of wind on it, and it’s got gas, and it’s got nuclear, and the supply lines from winds are crazy – they go up and down and up and down all the time. The supply line from nuclear is just like a calm, serene flat line in comparison and, you know, this tells you everything you need to know about what the grid needs. The problem is both of the things you said, it is both, in the west at least, in countries like the United Kingdom, in America, France, basically we’ve lost the ability to build them. We haven’t built any of them for such a long time, most countries have gone sort of 20 or 30 years since they last started building one. The supply chains, the skills, the people, are just crufty; they’re not they’re not up to scratch, they’re not used to building these things. And this means that when you start building one, it’s very slow and it’s very painful, and when you need to be loaned a lot of money for a thing that you’re kind of like: “Well I don’t know when exactly I can start paying you back, maybe it’ll be in five years, maybe it’ll be in eight years, it could be 12 years.” Or it could, in the case of something like Olkiluoto, which is the Finnish nuclear power plant that is still not finished, despite being started in 2005, it could be like almost 20 years.
The other thing about nuclear plants of course is that they’re incredibly highly regulated because they have to be because, you know, everyone’s worried that something dangerous will happen, that there’ll be a meltdown.
We’ve also got people asking: what about nuclear waste? Where does that fit into the drawbacks of this?
Nuclear waste is obviously very potent stuff, but there’s a few things to say about it that are really important. One is that, just in terms of volume, it’s incredibly tiny; all of the nuclear waste that the planet has produced so far in 50 years, 60 years of running nuclear power plants is enough to fill one football field by about six feet. And that might sound like a lot, but if you think about the whole planet, it’s absolutely tiny. The amount of coal tailings, like basically the ash from the bottom of a coal power plant, is just stupendously, gigantically more enormous than that, and, in many cases, waste from coal power plants is as radioactive as waste for nuclear power plants. But there’s much fewer regulations about it, you know, you’ve got cases like in Tennessee where a big coal tailings pond just collapses and all of it flows into a river and everyone’s like: “oh, oh well.” If that was nuclear waste, we’d all be absolutely freaking out.
And the storage of this stuff is … it’s not a solved problem, but one place in the world is very far ahead and, it’s Finland, and they have built a huge, deep cave into which this stuff gets put. Not in a kind of Homer Simpson pouring some green sludge into a pit way, but in a, basically what you do is you take the waste, you vitrify it – which means you turn it into glass – then you put it in a specially made barrel that is made out of concrete, you slosh it into these specially made slots, then you bury the barrel of concrete in a big hole in the ground with a bunch more concrete. All of this happens hundreds of feet underground in a stone cave and when you’ve filled up all of these slots in the floor with barrels and barrels of waste, you seal it over forever and it’s gone.
And the Finns, in very Finnish style, say they don’t want any signage up at the top of the cave, saying ‘watch out there’s nuclear waste here’, because one of the sort of interesting long-term discussions is how do you warn future people don’t go here? The Finns have taken the approach of we’re just going to say nothing and assume that no one will ever find this thing. Which is an interesting approach. Basically, you know, there’s lots of components to it, but the waste issue, there are many, many more important things, not least, you know, warming up the planet and making it unliveable.
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