The Naïve Case against Nuclear Power

A s I clicked the link to open the Nation article “Nuclear Power Is a Dead End. We Must Abandon It Completely,”  I was struck by the sharp contrast between the resolute fatalism of its title and the conspicuous pop-up that invited me to join the Nation Wine Club, offering a self-described “exclusive membership” that delivers “fine handmade premium wines.” Ironically the featured bottle was a Bordeaux blend, named for the region in the country that generates more of its electricity from nuclear energy than any other. Contrary to what oenophile ecotopians may wish, much of their preferred beverage is created with the help of nuclear fission.

War Is More Dangerous than Power Plants
Although the anti-nuclear arguments in his article have been recycled continually for the last several decades (including critiques of nuclear’s safety, waste disposal, and cost), author Paul Hockenos has capitalized on a new situation to make his case, ironically in the country that until recently has boasted the second highest proportion of electricity sourced from nuclear: Ukraine. He claims that the Russian army’s capture of Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (the largest in Europe) earlier this year shows that no one should use nuclear technology anywhere in the world. This line of reasoning fails on several levels.

First and foremost, reliable, abundant energy is fundamental to 21st-century living. This reality must not be obscured by the tunnel vision that comes from cherry-picking moments of terror. According to climate scientists Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen of Columbia University, nuclear energy has saved 76,000 lives annually simply by displacing fossil-fuel plants (especially coal) that emit particulate matter into the air that people breathe. This number far exceeds even the high end of estimated deaths resulting from the only deadly radiological accident in the history of nuclear energy.

Second, Russia is still largely a petrostate, so it should be no surprise that all of Putin’s invasions have occurred when the price of crude oil was greater than $90 per barrel (2008 before the invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, 2014 before the invasion of Crimea, and 2022 before the invasion of the Donbas). Both anti-fossil-fuel and anti-nuclear political sentiments have gained steam in the 21st century, as countries in the West launched a wave of closures of domestic power plants (including coal and nuclear) while many European nations specifically shut down domestic oil and natural-gas wells. This self-sabotage has only increased European reliance on Russia, giving Putin greater economic strength than he would otherwise have.

Last but not least, even though the ongoing war is fluid and its precise results are ultimately unpredictable, it is very unlikely that an external military attack would trigger a reactor meltdown. If missiles shelled the plant itself, the thick layers of concrete reinforced by steel rebar that form its containment would protect the reactors inside. Of course, it is possible that Russian forces in control of the plant could attempt to melt down the reactors, but the process would be slow enough that there would be plenty of chances to stop it from completing. Moreover, a meltdown offers no clear benefit to Russia. To paraphrase energy analyst Mark Nelson: In the worst-case scenario of a meltdown at Zaporizhzhia, neither Russia nor Ukraine would stop the war, and neither Russia nor Ukraine would stop relying on nuclear energy. The status quo of simply occupying an important piece of energy infrastructure alone brings a tremendous advantage. If Putin wanted to deliver a lethal dose of radiation, he has much better tools at his disposal: nuclear weapons.

Since September, all six reactors at Zaporizhzhia have been safely shut down. The plant maintains multiple diesel-fueled backup generators, and it is also connected to the Ukrainian national grid (although these connections have been severed and repaired multiple times recently). Members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have visited the site and remain in close contact with the plant’s staff. The truth is that this war has already resulted in the killing of tens of thousands of people and the destruction of over $100 billion of infrastructure. If Putin wanted to kill a large number of Ukrainians by attacking an industrial site, there are many to choose from. One possible target is actually a renewable energy source: the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast. Incidentally, the deadliest power-plant accident in history involved the Banqiao Dam collapse in China in 1975, resulting in at least 26,000 deaths and the displacement of over 10 million people. By Hockenos’s logic, we should close all dams as well — just in case they may be in a war zone someday. Ultimately, nuclear power rarely results in death, whereas war almost always does.

The Strange Death of European Energy
Europe gets more of its electricity from nuclear energy than any other continent. The most common comparison that nuclear advocates focus on is that between two neighboring countries: France and Germany. The short story is that France’s nuclear-based Messmer Plan created an affordable 90 percent zero-emission grid within two decades, whereas Germany’s renewables-based Energiewende policy has resulted in an expensive, roughly 50 percent zero-emission grid within the same time frame. The French grid has not merely been self-reliant but has also acted as an exportable source for its neighbors, including Germany. As recently as the first half of 2022, the price of German electricity was above the EU average, while that of France was below it. Only with great effort could one lose sight of such a stark contrast, but Hockenos does not let us down.

Hockenos alleges that Germany has “dragged its heels on clean energy expansion.” This accusation of a lack of effort flies in the face of reality. Since 2000 Germany has allotted billions of euros in subsidies annually on its transition, closed eleven nuclear plants, and produced ten times as much electricity from solar and 400 percent more from wind. Yet after all this work, the country still has one of the highest carbon footprints in the European Union. Meanwhile, Think Atom, a German pro-nuclear climate-policy think tank, published a report in 2021 showing that merely preserving the nation’s then-existing nuclear plants would prevent the emission of one billion tons of carbon dioxide. It turns out that throwing money at a problem is not as wise as adhering to the well-known axiom “first, do no harm.”

On the other hand, it is true that the French nuclear fleet experienced some problems this past year, but the root cause was political, not technical. Even though the French already had one of the cleanest grids in the developed world thanks to nuclear power, they still decided to rapidly transition to majority renewables. The Energy Transition for Green Growth Act, passed in 2015 (shortly before the Paris Climate Accords), stipulated that France must reduce its nuclear fleet from 75 percent of electricity generation to only 50 percent by 2025. In its aftermath, the Fessenheim station, a fully operational 1.8-gigawatt plant, was prematurely shut down in 2020 just as the COVID-19 pandemic began. In its place, electricity generation from less reliable renewables and imported natural gas grew (since France had already banned fracking domestically). To make matters worse, several reactors were temporarily shut down for scheduled inspections, maintenance, and repairs during what turned out to be a global energy crisis following the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this year. Labor strikes by EDF union workers have not helped either. Finally, temperature regulations temporarily required a few reactors to reduce production for the sake of aquatic life in adjacent rivers (human populations were not at risk). In the end, despite the recent small drops in output, the fact remains that the majority of France’s nuclear fleet has been working quietly to keep the lights on for decades without any major problems. So President Macron has committed to refurbish the country’s existing nuclear plants and invest in a new fleet of advanced reactors to continue their success.

Accidents Happen (Infrequently)
Hockenos asserts that the “inherent danger of nuclear power is often relativized by advocates as the bitter pill we must choke down in light of its other advantages.” However, a “pill” that offers abundant electricity without emissions can hardly be described as “bitter.” In the author’s longest diatribe, he waxes eloquent about what he describes as the many accidents and dangerous accumulation of nuclear waste. However, he fails to mention the most relevant points about both subjects: There has been only one deadly nuclear accident in the over-60-year history of commercial nuclear power, and no one in the world has ever died from exposure to spent nuclear fuel. When deaths are calculated relative to how much electricity is generated, nuclear is just as safe as renewables. The long-term disposition of nuclear waste is a relatively minor issue compared to electricity shortages and air pollution. Moreover, advanced fast reactors can recycle the majority of existing spent fuel, leaving behind waste that remains hazardous to humans for less than 1,000 years (not millions). The remainder can be stored safely either above or below ground.

Long-Term Benefits Justify Short-Term Costs
Expensive up-front capital cost is the greatest obstacle to nuclear expansion, at least in the West. But why? The Catch-22 of nuclear energy began in the 1970s, when anti-nuclear activists engaged in public protests, pursued lawsuits to thwart the construction of new plants, and lobbied for unwieldy regulations disproportionate to the rest of the industry. This movement artificially made nuclear more expensive and slow to build (unlike the situation that prevailed from the 1950s to the early 1970s). More recently, solar and wind have been disproportionately over-subsidized under the pretense of fighting climate change, even though nuclear has a lower life-cycle carbon footprint, according to a recent UNECE report. Even if the capital expenditure is higher in the short term, achieving a mostly decarbonized grid is cheaper in the long term with nuclear as baseload. Compared to other zero-emission sources, nuclear requires a significantly lower amount of land, new transmission lines, materials, and stored backup — all on a per-electricity-unit-generated basis. A system that relies mostly on renewables has to invest that much more in each of these areas. Humanity will likely stick around for quite a while, so nuclear is not a bad bet, just a long bet.

Grid Reliability Takes Precedence
To explain his engineering philosophy, Mikhail Kalashnikov (designer of the AK-47 rifle) is credited with saying, “Anything that is complex is not useful and anything that is useful is simple.” Keeping this in mind, a common Trojan horse for anti-nuclear advocates such as Hockenos is “grid flexibility.” This term is a red flag because it is not explicitly defined. It is no coincidence that the frantic buildup of the least reliable energy sources (solar and wind) in the West has coincided with an increased reliance on natural gas. Without nuclear there is a persistent need for dependable fossil fuels to rescue a grid when the sun does not shine enough and the wind does not blow enough. Germans have suffered from this phenomenon so much that they created a word for it: dunkelflaute (dark wind lull). Although Hockenos wrote an article last summer about why people should not use air conditioning, he may feel differently about heat — especially since he lives in a cold climate (and more people die from cold weather than from hot). Panic buying of space heaters and even firewood is happening in Germany today because not even the most radical anti-nuclear activists can deny that winter is coming.

The Current Energy Inflection Point
With crisis comes opportunity, in this case brought about by Covid lockdowns, power-plant closures, and the war in Ukraine. Hockenos may not have noticed, but the result has been a shift in popular attitudes on nuclear throughout the West, culminating with nuclear energy (and natural gas) being added to the official EU green taxonomy. Ironically one of the strongest arguments against shutting down existing nuclear facilities can be found in an article written last year by Hockenos on the problems with Germany’s taxpayer-subsidized all-renewable program. He admits that this policy makes “its energy among the most costly in Europe,” partly because “batteries still don’t have the capacity to bottle up enough clean power for Germany to hold out even for a couple of fossil-free hours, much less days.” However, Hockenos’s solution is to create a piecemeal system just as byzantine as the European Union itself, based on techno-utopian “visions of a long-distance smart transmission network that would extend from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean Sea, capable of seamlessly balancing shortfalls and surpluses — eventually with 100 percent green energy.” Even he acknowledges that “it won’t cover all of Europe anytime soon.”

The takeaway here is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. The reason that France expanded its nuclear power so dramatically was not to decarbonize but instead to decrease its energy dependence on OPEC in the wake of the energy crisis of the 1970s. Given that France achieved both of these ends by expanding nuclear energy, it makes no sense to insist on a precarious, renewables-only grid that has been achieved in the developed world only by a couple of low-population countries naturally blessed with uncommonly great hydropower potential (Iceland and Norway). We must not miss the forest for the trees by accepting irrational policies that are all but certain to harm the people purported to be helped by them. Despite what Hockenos believes, nuclear should not be abandoned, but instead should be embraced and celebrated with glasses raised (perhaps filled with a Bordeaux blend).