Nuclear Power Is Already Great
When “nuclear-loving greens” demand innovation, they imply something is wrong with current reactors, and slow down climate policy. This needs to stop.
At first, it was something of a sensation when Stewart Brand, the founder of the legendary Whole Earth Catalog, came out in favour of nuclear power. The man who led the back-to-the-land movement in the 1960s and inspired his followers to build windmills, grow organic food, and live off-grid was now advocating an energy source he had long been against.
It was 2007. Climate change was becoming an urgent problem. Since nuclear plants don’t emit greenhouse gases, Brand told The New York Times, they need to be quickly built on a large scale to replace fossil-fuel plants. He also expressed guilt at his previous scaremongering about nuclear power. Splitting atoms of enriched uranium was much safer than he had always believed and the resulting radioactive waste posed much less of a problem than he had previously thought.
Stewart Brand wasn’t the first convert to nuclear. In 2004, James Lovelock, a long-time environmentalist hero and the creator of the Gaia theory, made an impassioned appeal in its favour: “I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy,” he said. He considered it “the only green solution.”
The environmental case for nuclear power is pretty straightforward because the energy density of enriched uranium is orders of magnitude larger than that of fossil fuels. This means that nuclear power requires very few minerals and materials and very little land area, resulting in only a small environmental footprint. An analysis of the energy policies of 26 countries since the 1970s has shown that deployment of nuclear power is a key driver of fast decarbonisation.
These claims have been backed up by climate scientists and energy experts. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) has calculated that nuclear power has the lowest impact on ecosystems of any current power source by far. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognises nuclear power as one of its “technology solutions.” The International Energy Agency (IEA) urges governments not to close nuclear plants, but to build new ones.
Brand’s change of mind, which is laid out in his 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, encouraged other greens to express their willingness to support nuclear power as a viable supplement to renewables. In the UK, the green supporters of nuclear included Stephen Tindale, the late former director of Greenpeace; Lord Chris Smith of Finsbury, then chair of the Environment Agency; and Chris Goodall, a Green Party activist who has written an award-winning book on living a low-carbon life. The most famous of the bunch was George Monbiot, an intellectual forerunner of the green progressive movement, who explained in 2011 how he has learned to “love” nuclear power.
In 2012, leading climate author and campaigner Mark Lynas expressed his doubts about environmentalists who are supposedly committed to halting climate change, while continuing to oppose nuclear power. Soon, green pro-nuclear groups formed, including Environmental Progress, founded by a long-time green activist, and Emergency Reactor, founded by a former Extinction Rebellion UK spokesperson. The Stand Up for Nuclear movement has now organised dozens of rallies all around the world.
It seemed that Stewart Brand was right when he predicted that environmentalists would soon share his affection for nuclear power.
Regis Nicoll
Indeed, popular support for nuclear has grown as global warming continues to pose a threat and as Europe’s energy dependence on Russia has become increasingly evident. In the US, too, support for nuclear has been growing: 57 percent of respondents to a 2023 survey wanted more nuclear plants, up from 43 percent in 2020. During the same period, support for nuclear energy in the Netherlands increased by 50 percent: nuclear now has twice as many proponents there as opponents. In Poland, support for nuclear has grown even faster: from 39 to 75 percent in only one and a half years.
The World Nuclear Association estimates that more than 60 nuclear reactors are under construction, more than 110 reactors are planned, and over 300 new reactors have been proposed. Only 439 reactors are currently online. If all the plans proceed, the global capacity of nuclear power plants will have increased by 26 per cent by 2050, according to a 2021 report by World Energy Outlook.
But some pro-nuclear greens seem to be undermining these efforts. So, what happened? In a word: innovation.
The nuclear industry is currently experiencing a wave of innovation. Fuels are being developed that can withstand every conceivable accident, as are reactors that can more easily cope with the weather-dependent electricity supply of wind turbines and solar panels. Much of the focus of this research and development is on small modular reactors (SMRs), whose components are produced in factories and assembled on site.
New nuclear plants are more efficient, require less uranium, and produce less waste. They are also becoming safer. Some designs are intended for sites near coastal cities, others for remote areas. Some use both the power and the heat they release to produce hydrogen, which can be used in industry or as fuel for aircraft and container ships.
One popular design is the molten salt reactor, which uses thorium and produces relatively short-lived waste that takes “only” around 300 years to become harmless. The reactor is supposed to be entirely safe thanks to features like a plug of solidified salt, which automatically melts when the reactor gets too hot—for instance, if the cooling pumps lose power. Once the sealing plug has melted, the salt flows into storage vessels underneath the reactor, stopping the nuclear fission process and rendering a meltdown impossible.
Then there’s nuclear fusion. In a fusion reactor, extremely high temperatures and pressures cause atoms to be compressed, as they are in stars, thus releasing a great deal of energy. So far, nuclear fusion has been only a pipe dream. But in 2021, researchers at the Oxfordshire-based Culham Centre for Fusion Energy managed to sustain fusion for five seconds, releasing 59 megajoules of energy. That’s hardly enough to boil a few dozen kettles of water but it does suggest that we may be closer to developing nuclear fusion reactors than previously thought.
Among the proponents of nuclear, there’s been a great deal of discussion about the benefits and downsides of each new reactor design. Every design has a flaw: in one case, the material would be prone to corrosion; in another, disposal of fission products might become a concern. Some reactors can recycle radioactive waste—but such reactors might also be used to produce weapons-grade material.
While innovation is obviously valuable, the endless technical disputes over the pros and cons of each new reactor design may inadvertently reinforce the main point made by the opponents of nuclear: that today’s nuclear plants are flawed. “Advanced nuclear”—the umbrella term for all such innovations—suggests that current nuclear plants are not advanced but obsolete, or at the very least in need of serious adaptations.
Michael Shellenberger
Bill Gates, for example, has invested heavily in the start-up TerraPower, which was set up into order to build a new design of nuclear reactor. Gates insists that the nuclear industry needs to “innovate and adapt.” But although Gates has been funding this company since 2006, TerraPower took until June 2024 to finally start building its non-pressurised, sodium-cooled natrium reactor. It’s no more than a demonstration project.
Bill Gates’ involvement in advanced nuclear may be helping to make the technology more popular and promote the need for nuclear energy in the future. But Michael Shellenberger, a pioneer of the pro-nuclear environmental movement, believes that by promising a “magic box” that is “apocalypse-free,” Gates is suggesting that current nuclear reactors are not fit for purpose. Likewise, a speaker in Oliver Stone’s award-winning 2022 documentary Nuclear Now comments that “We need to do nuclear power differently.”
But this focus on innovation may obscure the many ways in which nuclear power is already great. It’s one of the safest ways of producing power. A nuclear plant doesn’t pollute the air because it doesn’t emit any harmful gases. Since radioactive waste is collected and shielded properly, nobody has ever been harmed by it. Nuclear plants produce few greenhouse gases. All kinds of safeguards ensure that civilian nuclear programs are not used for military purposes.
It’s telling that each innovation seems designed to make nuclear power socially acceptable. New reactors are supposed to be safer, because nuclear power is considered to be fraught with inherent dangers. They need to be flexible, because the erratic production from solar panels and wind turbines should somehow be prioritised. And they must be made smaller, because of the old green axiom: “small is beautiful.”
But the problems with nuclear power have nothing to do with technology. The problems are psychological.
George Monbiot provides an instructive example. Back in 2000, he wrote in the Guardian that getting energy by splitting atoms was “the world’s most dangerous business” and that it was “time to shut nuclear power down.”
Then, in 2011, Monbiot announced his “love” of nuclear power. But two years later, he clarified his position by saying he did not support nuclear power “at any cost.” For the reactor that was going to be built at Hinkley Point, he considered the price “too high.” Besides, he argued, the reactor design was “clunky”: it “already looks outdated, beside the promise of integral fast reactors and liquid fluoride thorium reactors.”
In 2015, he wrote in the Guardian that his change of heart about nuclear power had been “painful and disorienting” and was “antagonising friends and alienating colleagues.” Although he still believed nuclear power has “great potential to balance the output from renewables,” Monbiot once again urged the government to “kill” the planned reactor at Hinkley Point and spend the earmarked money on “a comparative study of nuclear technologies, including the many proposed designs for small modular reactors.”
This is not climate action. It is procrastination.
The same thing happened to Chris Goodall, who is now a Green Party candidate. In a 2015 article in The Ecologist, he wrote about the latest nuclear reactors in Finland, France, and the US. These projects were massively delayed and over budget—like most large infrastructure projects nowadays. Goodall reflected that this has made him uncertain as to whether he still supports nuclear power. Would he also have stopped supporting high-speed rail projects—which are also typically delivered late and over budget? By 2020, when he wrote his book What We Need to Do Now, Goodall considered the construction of nuclear reactors “uniformly disastrous.” In his most recent book, Possible: Ways to Net Zero, nuclear energy hardly gets a mention.
As for Mark Lynas, he now advocates recycling highly radioactive waste in fast breeder reactors of which, he argues, there should be a “rapid mass deployment.” This is a great idea, but nearly all breeder reactor programs have now been abandoned, given the higher risks that the technology could be used for nuclear weapons.
These changes of heart among formerly nuclear-loving greens have had real consequences. Ed Milliband is now considering scrapping the planned construction of two large nuclear reactors in Anglesey, Wales. According to The Telegraph, the UK Energy Secretary has told officials to “review” future nuclear plans. Milliband is interested in building small modular reactors rather than the old-fashioned large plants, since the smaller ones “could be built and switched on more quickly.”
Of course, innovation is exciting. In PowerPoint presentations, any new reactor looks pretty and operates perfectly. But when it comes to nuclear reactors, it’s worth listening to Hyman Rickover, who designed the first nuclear submarine. As Rickover pointed out in 1957, “Any plant you haven’t built yet is always more efficient than the one you have built…. They are in the talking stage. Then they are all efficient. They are all cheap. They are all easy to build, and none have any problems.”
The early proponents of nuclear power were successful because they considered the world as it is, rather than how it ought to be. They noticed that everyone interested in reducing greenhouse gases seemed to dream of all kinds of solutions that do not yet exist: large-scale storage of excess green power in super-batteries or hydrogen; the introduction of a global carbon tax; an intelligent worldwide electricity grid that somehow matches supply with demand.
One day these things might come to fruition, but in the meantime, we need to do something that we already know will work. So when greens like George Monbiot stop defending nuclear plants as we know them and start advocating exotic ones, they suffer from the same disturbing weakness as those who want to run everything on 100% renewable energy—they are living in a dream world.
We need to build more of the kind of nuclear plants that have already proved themselves. Opting for existing designs means benefiting from the experience of builders, engineers, operators, and regulators. As in any industry, standardisation and serial construction are essential if we want to get nuclear plants ready faster and more cheaply.
By promoting the construction of new reactors rather than the ones that have already been working well for decades, Monbiot and others are condemning a long-proven technology to an eternal series of experiments. If pro-nuclear greens want to be taken seriously, they will have to get real.
