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The Advantages and Disadvantages of Nuclear Energy

Since the first nuclear plant started operations in the 1950s, the world has been highly divided on nuclear as a source of energy. While it is a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels, this type of power is also associated with some of the world’s most dangerous and deadliest weapons, not to mention nuclear disasters . The extremely high cost and lengthy process to build nuclear plants are compensated by the fact that producing nuclear energy is not nearly as polluting as oil and coal. In the race to net-zero carbon emissions, should countries still rely on nuclear energy or should they make space for more fossil fuels and renewable energy sources? We take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear energy. 

What Is Nuclear Energy?

Nuclear energy is the energy source found in an atom’s nucleus, or core. Once extracted, this energy can be used to produce electricity by creating nuclear fission in a reactor through two kinds of atomic reaction: nuclear fusion and nuclear fission. During the latter, uranium used as fuel causes atoms to split into two or more nuclei. The energy released from fission generates heat that brings a cooling agent, usually water, to boil. The steam deriving from boiling or pressurised water is then channelled to spin turbines to generate electricity. To produce nuclear fission, reactors make use of uranium as fuel.

For centuries, the industrialisation of economies around the world was made possible by fossil fuels like coal, natural gas, and petroleum and only in recent years countries opened up to alternative, renewable sources like solar and wind energy. In the 1950s, early commercial nuclear power stations started operations, offering to many countries around the world an alternative to oil and gas import dependency and a far less polluting energy source than fossil fuels. Following the 1970s energy crisis and the dramatic increase of oil prices that resulted from it, more and more countries decided to embark on nuclear power programmes. Indeed, most reactors have been built  between 1970 and 1985 worldwide. Today, nuclear energy meets around 10% of global energy demand , with 439 currently operational nuclear plants in 32 countries and about 55 new reactors under construction. In 2020, 13 countries produced at least one-quarter of their total electricity from nuclear, with the US, China, and France dominating the market by far. 

Fossil fuels make up 60% of the United States’ electricity while the remaining 40% is equally split between renewables and nuclear power. France embarked on a sweeping expansion of its nuclear power industry in the 1970s with the ultimate goal of breaking its dependence on foreign oil. In doing this, the country was able to build up its economy by simultaneously cutting its emissions at a rate never seen before. Today, France is home to 56 operating reactors and it relies on nuclear power for 70% of its electricity . 

You might also like: A ‘Breakthrough’ In Nuclear Fusion: What Does It Mean for the Future of Energy Generation?

Advantages of Nuclear Energy

France’s success in cutting down emissions is a clear example of some of the main advantages of nuclear energy over fossil fuels. First and foremost, nuclear energy is clean and it provides pollution-free power with no greenhouse gas emissions. Contrary to what many believe, cooling towers in nuclear plants only emit water vapour and are thus, not releasing any pollutant or radioactive substance into the atmosphere. Compared to all the energy alternatives we currently have on hand, many experts believe that nuclear energy is indeed one of the cleanest sources. Many nuclear energy supporters also argue that nuclear power is responsible for the fastest decarbonisation effort in history , with big nuclear players like France, Saudi Arabia, Canada, and South Korea being among the countries that recorded the fastest decline in carbon intensity and experienced a clean energy transition by building nuclear reactors and hydroelectric dams.

Earlier this year, the European Commission took a clear stance on nuclear power by labelling it a green source of energy in its classification system establishing a list of environmentally sustainable economic activities. While nuclear energy may be clean and its production emission-free, experts highlight a hidden danger of this power: nuclear waste. The highly radioactive and toxic byproduct from nuclear reactors can remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years. However, this is still considered a much easier environmental problem to solve than climate change. The main reason for this is that as much as 90% of the nuclear waste generated by the production of nuclear energy can be recycled. Indeed, the fuel used in a reactor, typically uranium, can be treated and put into another reactor as only a small amount of energy in their fuel is extracted in the fission process.

A rather important advantage of nuclear energy is that it is much safer than fossil fuels from a public health perspective. The pro-nuclear movement leverages the fact that nuclear waste is not even remotely as dangerous as the toxic chemicals coming from fossil fuels. Indeed, coal and oil act as ‘ invisible killers ’ and are responsible for 1 in 5 deaths worldwide . In 2018 alone, fossil fuels killed 8.7 million people globally. In contrast, in nearly 70 years since the beginning of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm: the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Of these, only the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine directly caused any deaths.

Finally, nuclear energy has some advantages compared to some of the most popular renewable energy sources. According to the US Office of Nuclear Energy , nuclear power has by far the highest capacity factor, with plants requiring less maintenance, capable to operate for up to two years before refuelling and able to produce maximum power more than 93% of the time during the year, making them three times more reliable than wind and solar plants. 

You might also like: Nuclear Energy: A Silver Bullet For Clean Energy?

Disadvantages of Nuclear Energy

The anti-nuclear movement opposes the use of this type of energy for several reasons. The first and currently most talked about disadvantage of nuclear energy is the nuclear weapon proliferation, a debate triggered by the deadly atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War and recently reopened following rising concerns over nuclear escalation in the Ukraine-Russia conflict . After the world saw the highly destructive effect of these bombs, which caused the death of tens of thousands of people, not only in the impact itself but also in the days, weeks, and months after the tragedy as a consequence of radiation sickness, nuclear energy evolved to a pure means of generating electricity. In 1970, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons entered into force. Its objective was to prevent the spread of such weapons to eventually achieve nuclear disarmament as well as promote peaceful uses of nuclear energy. However, opposers of this energy source still see nuclear energy as being deeply intertwined with nuclear weapons technologies and believe that, with nuclear technologies becoming globally available, the risk of them falling into the wrong hands is high, especially in countries with high levels of corruption and instability. 

As mentioned in the previous section, nuclear energy is clean. However, radioactive nuclear waste contains highly poisonous chemicals like plutonium and the uranium pellets used as fuel. These materials can be extremely toxic for tens of thousands of years and for this reason, they need to be meticulously and permanently disposed of. Since the 1950s, a stockpile of 250,000 tonnes of highly radioactive nuclear waste has been accumulated and distributed across the world, with 90,000 metric tons stored in the US alone. Knowing the dangers of nuclear waste, many oppose nuclear energy for fears of accidents, despite these being extremely unlikely to happen. Indeed, opposers know that when nuclear does fail, it can fail spectacularly. They were reminded of this in 2011, when the Fukushima disaster, despite not killing anyone directly, led to the displacement of more than 150,000 people, thousands of evacuation/related deaths and billions of dollars in cleanup costs. 

Lastly, if compared to other sources of energy, nuclear power is one of the most expensive and time-consuming forms of energy. Nuclear plants cost billions of dollars to build and they take much longer than any other infrastructure for renewable energy, sometimes even more than a decade. However, while nuclear power plants are expensive to build, they are relatively cheap to run , a factor that improves its competitiveness. Still, the long building process is considered a significant obstacle in the run to net-zero emissions that countries around the world have committed to. If they hope to meet their emission reduction targets in time, they cannot afford to rely on new nuclear plants.

You might also like: The Nuclear Waste Disposal Dilemma

Who Wins the Nuclear Debate?

There are a multitude of advantages and disadvantages of nuclear energy and the debate on whether to keep this technology or find other alternatives is destined to continue in the years to come. Nuclear power can be a highly destructive weapon, but the risks of a nuclear catastrophe are relatively low. While historic nuclear disasters can be counted on the fingers of a single hand, they are remembered for their devastating impact and the life-threatening consequences they sparked (or almost sparked). However, it is important to remember that fossil fuels like coal and oil represent a much bigger threat and silently kill millions of people every year worldwide. Another big aspect to take into account, and one that is currently discussed by global leaders, is the dependence of some of the world’s largest economies on countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq for fossil fuels. While the 2011 Fukushima disaster, for example, pushed the then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel to close all of Germany’s nuclear plants, her decision only increased the country’s dependence on much more polluting Russian oil. Nuclear supporters argue that relying on nuclear energy would decrease the energy dependency from third countries. However, raw materials such as the uranium needed to make plants function would still need to be imported from countries like Canada, Kazakhstan, and Australia. The debate thus shifts to another problem: which countries should we rely on for imports and, most importantly, is it worth keeping these dependencies?

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The top pros and cons of nuclear energy

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As with any energy source, renewable or non-renewable, there are pros and cons to using nuclear energy. We'll review some of these top benefits and drawbacks to keep in mind when comparing nuclear to other energy sources.

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Top pros and cons of nuclear energy

Despite the limited development of nuclear power plants recently, nuclear energy still supplies about 20 percent of U.S. electricity. As with any energy source, it comes with various advantages and disadvantages. Here are just a few top ones to keep in mind:

Pros and cons of nuclear power

On the pros side, nuclear energy is a carbon-free electricity source (with other environmental benefits as well!). It needs a relatively small land area to operate and is a great energy source for reliable baseload power for the electric grid. On the cons side, nuclear is technically a non-renewable energy source, nuclear plants have a high up-front cost associated with them, and nuclear waste and the operation of nuclear plants pose some environmental and health challenges.

Below, we'll explore these pros and cons in further detail.

Advantages of nuclear energy

Here are four advantages of nuclear energy:

Carbon-free electricity

Small land footprint, high power output, reliable energy source.

While traditional fossil fuel generation sources pump massive amounts of carbon dioxide (the primary cause of global climate change) into the atmosphere, nuclear energy plants do not produce carbon dioxide, or any air pollution, during operation. That's not to say that they don't pollute at all, though - mining, refining, and preparing uranium use energy, and nuclear waste pose a completely separate environmental problem. We'll discuss nuclear waste's role in all this later on.

Nuclear energy plants take up far less physical space than other common clean energy facilities (particularly wind and solar power). According to the Department of Energy, a typical nuclear facility producing 1,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity takes up about one square mile of space. Comparatively, a wind farm producing the same amount of energy takes 360x more land area, and a large-scale solar farm uses 75x more space. That's 431 wind turbines or 3.125 million (!!!) solar panels. Check out this graphic from the Department of Energy for more fun comparisons of energy sources, like how many Corvettes are needed to produce the same amount of energy as one nuclear reactor.

Nuclear power plants produce high energy levels compared to most power sources (especially renewables), making them a great provider of baseload electricity. "Baseload electricity" simply means the minimum level of energy demand on the grid over some time, say a week. Nuclear has the potential to be this high-output baseload source, and we're headed that way - since 1990, nuclear power plants have generated 20% of the US's electricity. Additionally, nuclear is a prime candidate for replacing current baseload electricity sources that contribute significantly to air pollution, such as large coal plants.

Lastly, nuclear energy is a reliable renewable energy source based on its constant production and accessibility. Nuclear power plants produce their maximum power output more often (93% of the time) than any other energy source, and because of this round-the-clock stability, makes nuclear energy an ideal source of reliable baseload electricity for the grid.

Disadvantages of nuclear energy

Here are four disadvantages of nuclear energy:

Uranium is technically non-renewable

Very high upfront costs

Nuclear waste

Malfunctions can be catastrophic, uranium is non-renewable.

Although nuclear energy is a "clean" source of power, it is technically not renewable. Current nuclear technology relies on uranium ore for fuel, which exists in limited amounts in the earth's crust. The longer we rely on nuclear power (and uranium ore in particular), the more depleted the earth's uranium resources will become, which will drive up the cost of extracting it and the negative environmental impacts of mining and processing the uranium.

High upfront costs

Operating a nuclear energy plant is a relatively low-cost endeavor, but building it in the first place is very expensive. Nuclear reactors are complex devices that require many levels of safety built around them, which drives up the cost of new nuclear plants. 

And now, to the thorny issue of nuclear waste – we could write hundreds of articles about the science of nuclear waste, its political implications, cost/benefit analyses, and more regarding this particular subject. The key takeaway from that would be this: nuclear waste is a complicated issue, and we won't claim to be anything near experts . Nuclear waste is radioactive, making it an environmental and health catastrophe waiting to happen. These reasons are exactly why governments spend tons of money to safely package and dispose of used-up nuclear fuel. At the end of the day, yes, nuclear waste is a dangerous by-product of nuclear power plants, and it takes extreme care and advanced technology to handle it properly.

A nuclear meltdown occurs when the heat created by a nuclear reactor exceeds the amount of heat being transferred out by the cooling systems; this causes the system to exceed its melting point. If this happens, hot radioactive vapors can escape, which can cause nuclear plants to melt down fully and combust, releasing harmful radioactive materials into the environment. This is an extremely unlikely worst-case scenario, and nuclear plants are equipped with numerous safety measures to prevent meltdowns.

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The Nuclear Debate

(Updated May 2022)

• The underlying question is how electricity is best produced now and in the years to come.
• Between 1990 and 2019 electricity demand doubled. It is expected to roughly double again by 2050.
• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated that at least 80% of the world's electricity must be low carbon by 2050 to keep warming within 2 °C of pre-industrial levels.
• At present, about two-thirds of electricity is produced from the burning of fossil fuels. 
• Nuclear is proven, scalable and reliable, and its expanded use will be essential for many countries to achieve their decarbonization goals.

Notes & references

1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),  Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report  – Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  (2015) [ Back ] 2. International Energy Agency,  Data and Statistics   [ Back ] 3. IPCC, Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation – Summary for Policymakers and Technical Summary , Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , Annex II, Table A.II.4 (2011, reprinted 2012) [ Back ] 4. OECD International Energy Agency and OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, Projected Costs of Generating Electricity , 2015 Edition (September 2015) [ Back ] 5. OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, Comparing Nuclear Accident Risks with Those from Other Energy Sources , 2010 [ Back ] 6. UNSCEAR, Sources and Effects of Ionising Radiation, Report to the UN General Assembly , 2008 [ Back ] 7. World Health Organization, Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programmes , Report of the UN Chernobyl Forum Expert Group "Health" , 2006 [ Back ] 8. American Cancer Society, Thyroid Cancer Survival Rates, by Type and Stage (revised 9 January 2020) [ Back ] 9. United Nations, No Immediate Health Risks from Fukishima Nuclear Accident Says UN Export Science Panel , 2013 [ Back ] 10. UK Government press release, Government confirms Hinkley Point C project following new agreement in principle with EDF (15 September 2016) [ Back ] 11. Ørsted website, Renewable energy record achieved at London Array (1 August 2016) [ Back ] 12. Kharechi and Hansen, Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power , 2013 [ Back ] 13. UNSCEAR, Sources and Effects of Ionising Radiation , 2010 [ Back ]

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Reconsidering the Risks of Nuclear Power

by Jordan Wilkerson figures by Shannon McArdel

The United States emits an immense amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is extremely likely that the rising global temperature trends since the mid-20 th century is dominantly due to human activity . No scientific organization of national or international standing disputes this. Furthermore, the US Department of Defense has officially stated that climate change poses a serious national security threat . In light of all of this, the United States recently ratified the Paris Climate Agreement, which means we are committed to significantly reducing our carbon emissions . How do we do that?

Given that, in 2015, we released 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) from electricity generation alone, and fossil fuels accounted for over 99% of these emissions , a great place to start would be to begin replacing fossil fuel power plants with alternative energy sources. The main alternatives are solar, wind, and nuclear. The first two are certainly alluring, attracting the investment of a lot of government money worldwide. However, they are also variable. The wind isn’t always blowing; days aren’t always clear and sunny. This isn’t to say relying solely on renewables is impossible or even unrealistic with some clever storage and transportation strategies. However, it is a challenge to replace the constantly running fossil fuel power plants with sources that are intermittent.

Ideally, we’d have a source that doesn’t emit CO 2 and is consistently reliable; this is known as a baseload energy source. In this context, nuclear energy is the main alternative energy source that works. Yet, unlike its fickle counterparts, nuclear energy is subjected to hostile attitudes adopted by a number of governments in the world which restrict the building or continual operation of power plants. Fear for Chernobyl and Fukushima-type catastrophes exacerbate the unpopularity of going nuclear. The US, currently the world’s largest producer, relies on nuclear energy for 20% of its overall electricity generation . Yet there has historically been a strong anti-nuclear movement in the US, and the sentiment is still somewhat present today, as demonstrated by closures of nuclear power plants and stances held by prominent political figures such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders . In order to assess whether such notoriety is deserved, we need to learn about the physics of nuclear power and compare the statistics of its supposed dangers with that of existing energy sources.

What is Nuclear Energy?

Nuclear energy and fossil fuel energy have similarities in the way they are extracted. The basis behind running a fossil fuel power plant can be illustrated by examining a typical fire. In this instance, organic matter such as wood or natural gas is burned and converted into CO 2 (see Figure 1). In this case, we change which atoms bond to each other and harvest the energy that is released when they reach a more stable configuration (as CO 2 ). In a nuclear power plant, we are doing the same thing: extracting energy from atoms that ultimately gets converted to electricity. However, in a nuclear reaction, we don’t just rearrange which atoms bond to which. We change the atoms themselves , and the energy released is enormous.

How do the atoms change? In a nuclear reaction, the nucleus of the atom breaks into several pieces and releases an immense amount of energy. This process is known as nuclear fission. The nucleus we break apart for energy in most nuclear power plants is that of the uranium atom, specifically uranium-235 (that number indicates the total number of neutrons and protons in the nucleus).

To start a fire, which is an ongoing chemical reaction, we merely need some friction. Ongoing nuclear reactions do not begin so easily. To initiate the chain of reactions that supply us with energy in a nuclear power plant, we must bombard the uranium rod with high-energy neutrons. After we do this, the uranium breaks into two smaller nuclei (e.g. krypton and barium) and ejects several high-energy neutrons that cause more uranium to undergo fission.

This chain reaction provides a lot of energy, and the best part is that it does so without emitting any CO 2 . In fact, the only CO 2 emitted due to nuclear power plants is what’s released indirectly from developing the construction materials! How does this compare to other energy sources? Coal power emits the equivalent of 820 g CO 2 worth of greenhouse gases for every kilowatt-hour (g CO 2 eq/kWh) of electricity produced. (A kWh is a standard unit of energy used in billing by electrical utilities). Natural gas has a lower output at 490 g CO 2 eq/kWh. Nuclear power, though? A mere 16 g CO 2 /kWh . This is the lowest of all commercial baseload energy sources (see Figure 2).

The Problems with Nuclear Energy

Nuclear energy isn’t all good news, though. The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster is the latest testament to that. This disaster was a consequence of the combination of a tsunami and a powerful earthquake in March 2011. Although the chain fissile reactions were shut down automatically in response to the earthquake, the tsunami damaged generators responsible for cooling the reactors of the plant. Without cooling, the components of the core of the reactors can literally melt from all the energy released from these reactions. In this case, they did. Radioactive material was subsequently released along with several chemical explosions, which were initiated by the immense heat released by the nuclear reactions.

Why is radioactive material dangerous? To start with, to be radioactive refers to the fact that this material is actively emitting radiation. This is not the same kind of radiation we’re familiar with such as visible electromagnetic radiation from a light bulb. Electromagnetic radiation emitted as a result of nuclear fission, known as gamma rays, has 100,000 times more energy than visible light. Radioactive material can also emit highly energetic electrons (beta particles) and small clusters of protons and neutrons (alpha particles). This concentrated energy causes the molecules in our body to react in ways that can be extremely damaging, sometimes giving rise to cancer.

Radioactivity isn’t just a characteristic of the material being used in the nuclear reactor. Even in the absence of a nuclear accident, nuclear power inevitably produces dangerous materials: radioactive waste. This waste, composed of mostly unconverted uranium along with intermediate products plutonium and curium, stays radioactive for extremely long periods, too, presenting a major problem in regards to storage .

Putting Nuclear Power in Perspective

There is no doubt that nuclear power has problems that can cost human lives, but such risks are borne by all major modes of energy production. Therefore, the question shouldn’t be, ‘is nuclear energy deadly?’ Instead, we should ask ‘is nuclear energy more dangerous than other energy sources?’

Fossil fuels have a host of problems themselves. The byproducts from burning fossil fuels are toxic pollutants that produce ozone, toxic organic aerosols, particulate matter, and heavy metals. The World Health Organization has stated the urban air pollution, which is a mixture of all of the chemicals just described, causes 7 million deaths annually or about 1 in 8 of total deaths. Furthermore, coal power plants release more radioactive material per kWh into the environment in the form of coal ash than does waste from a nuclear power plant under standard shielding protocols. This means that, under normal operations, the radioactive waste problem associated with one of the most mainstream energy sources in use actually exceeds that from nuclear energy .

In fact, on a per kWh of energy produced basis, both the European Union and the Paul Scherrer Institute, the largest Swiss national research institute, found an interesting trend regarding the fatalities attributable to each energy source . Remarkably, nuclear power is the benchmark to beat, outranking coal, oil, gas, and even wind by a slight margin as the least deadly major energy resource in application (see Figure 3).

The nuclear industry is constantly developing innovative technologies and protocols towards making the energy production process failsafe. Newer generations of nuclear reactors, particularly what is called a pebble-bed reactor, are designed so that the nuclear chain reaction cannot run away and cause a meltdown – even in the event of complete failure of the reactor’s machinery. Geological stability considerations will also likely play a bigger role in approving new sites of construction. And although long-lived nuclear waste may remain dangerous for considerable periods of time, that timescale is not prohibitive. In fact, even without recycling the fuel, which would further shorten the lifetime of radioactive waste, the radioactivity of the waste is reduced to around 0.1% of the initial value after about 40-50 years .

The primary proposal for long-term storage of nuclear waste is burial in very carefully selected deep geological repositories. Yucca Mountain in Nevada was once a promising candidate, though this option was shut down in 2011 due to strictly political reasons. There is now only one deep waste repository in the US: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. However, this plant itself has faced some problems that highlight the need to research better alternatives for the Yucca Mountain repository. Unfortunately, the same sentiments that inspired closure of the Yucca Mountain repository have also inspired reducing research funding and preventing investigations of other potential geological locations . Finding a replacement for the Yucca Mountain repository is possible, but this requires greater cooperation between researchers and policy makers than is currently taking place.

Dangers associated with nuclear power are, in many ways, different from the dangers we face from other methods of getting energy. This might explain why fear of nuclear power persists and why the above fatality rates may surprise you. However, we know that nuclear energy does not produce the greenhouse gases that fossil fuels have been producing for over a century. Research also concludes that the more familiar dangers from using fossil fuels claim far more lives. Furthermore, with the advent of modern reactors such as the pebble-bed reactor and careful selection of plant sites, nuclear accidents like the one in Fukushima are actually not possible. When balanced with these notable benefits, the problems associated with nuclear power do not justify its immediate dismissal as a potential energy source for the world.

Jordan Wilkerson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemistry at Harvard University.

This article is part of our Special Edition: Dear Madam/Mister President.

For More Information:

1) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (learn how we know man-made climate change is happening)

2) Discussion of Nuclear Waste Disposal by American Physical Society

3) Six Air Pollutants Regulated under Clean Air Act (virtually all derived from fossil fuel combustion)

4) Comparing Radioactivity of Waste from Coal and Nuclear

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89 thoughts on “ Reconsidering the Risks of Nuclear Power ”

Important facts Nuclear material emitting radiation with a long half life ( say, over one year) is the kind that is not dangerous – you can handle it and be close to it without worrying about dying from the radiation emitted. The material with a short half life ( minutes or days) is very dangerous and should be avoided at all cost – never touch it. Much like computers or automobiles, the early nuclear reactor designs were very crude and many technological advances have benefitted humanity since the invention of the Studebaker or the Packard auto or the Unisys or the IBM mainframe computer. However, all operating nuclear reactors are the equivalent to the 1955 Studebaker or Chevy BelAir or the IBM mainframe since regulatory agencies have not allowed newer technology to be used for over 70 years. Sad, actually.

I think it’s good

“…fraidy little girly men.” So funny. Broad brushing is very funny. But it doesn’t prove any point.

I have been doing research for an essay and I found this article very helpful. Jordan does a great job of summarizing the evidence and the studies done by the various research groups. Though I don’t think the author meant for the article to be a persuasive argument for/against nuclear (if I’m wrong Jordan, please correct me). I found the ongoing comments debate to be sort of helpful as well, but a bit opinionated at some points. I never quite understood why some people are so scared of nuclear plants, but now I think I get it. I get my power from such a plant (I can actually see it from my house) and have always wondered about how it works and affects my area. Thank you for writing this article. Out of all the research I’ve done thus far, this was the biggest help. I am definitely going to cite it!

bruh who here is actually qualified?

Me just kidding I am not a Harvard student. I would be a good one but this was good for my project thanks for this essay.

First, no gendered name-calling (“girly-men” & “pussies” come to mind). As a woman, I find this highly offensive and objectionable. (I always wonder why some men resort to this and why women as a gender are so threatening to these men. Hmmm…) As preschool teachers often advise their young charges, use your words (not your insults).

Anyone who still remembers high school chemistry and physics should be able to understand this concept: highly radioactive materials have a very, very long half-life and their waste cannot be easily or safely disposed of. You don’t have to be a genius to know that nuclear power is unsafe at any speed (to borrow a phrase from Ralph Nader).

And all of the posters who disregard the poorest among us, you all need to get out more and experience the real world, where poor people and POC are dis-proportionally affected by energy/power plant explosions and climate disasters. Do I need to remind anyone of the heavy burden that Hurricane Katrina caused in poorer neighborhoods?

Never ever forget the reality of Love Canal, Three Mile Island, the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster in Alaska, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Humans make mistakes, humans cause harm, humans get greedy, humans cannot adequately plan for and mitigate natural disasters. “Hidden costs” is not just a phrase used in economics textbooks: they are the real injuries that people living in or near heavy industrial activity sustain.

Nuclear power is just bad science, bad engineering, bad planning.

Do you know what a joke is? Nerdista?

bruh im just here for my physics assessment yous are having a full on scientific debate in the comments…. if the harvard degree dude wants to help me with my math lmk ill give u my number lmao

Happy reading (or not) ! Cordially, Simon

Quote: Paragraph –

“The nuclear industry is constantly developing innovative technologies and protocols towards making the energy production process failsafe. Newer generations of nuclear reactors, particularly what is called a pebble-bed reactor, are designed so that the nuclear chain reaction cannot run away and cause a meltdown – even in the event of complete failure of the reactor’s machinery. Geological stability considerations will also likely play a bigger role in approving new sites of construction. And although long-lived nuclear waste may remain dangerous for considerable periods of time, that timescale is not prohibitive. In fact, even without recycling the fuel, which would further shorten the lifetime of radioactive waste, the radioactivity of the waste is reduced to around 0.1% of the initial value after about 40-50 years”

Comments: How can anyone make such statements? I guess a chemistry PhD candidate (Jordan Wilkerson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemistry at Harvard University) did in fact posted this. I’m concerned and won’t be consulting him for any balancing of any chemistry equations in the future. How much disinformation and misinformation that are communicate globally about nuclear waste? I wonder. Learning everyday.

Quote no. 2: Recycling nuclear fuel – misinformation and disinformation (Objectively) “In fact, even without recycling the fuel, which would further shorten the lifetime of radioactive waste, the radioactivity of the waste is reduced to around 0.1% of the initial value after about 40-50 years”

I am completely appalled by this statement and is completely false. I guess someone from Harvard wrote this so that the public reading it remain oblivious and just because a Harvard student wrote it, it must be credible, correct & true, right? NO (Objectively). It only demonstrates that some PhD candidates forgot to fact check scientific information (Objectively). This is worrisome.

Quote no.3: An eloquent statement (objectively) One statement is correct however, and I may add this quote as an eloquent statement: “Geological stability considerations will also likely play a bigger role in approving new sites of construction”

What happened with CNL considering a site (in Renfrew, ON) at a base of a mountain in their (Environmental Impact Statement Study) specifically in a seismic active geological structure? Objectively, I conclude that the environmental impact statement study did not explain fully all of the evidence and critical information about seismic risks in Renfrew ON and specifically in the selection process.

These are my opinions (objectively). I would never recommend a site for nuclear waste infrastructure (at surface) in a seismic active region (Objectively).

Cordially, Simon J Daigle, B.Sc., M.Sc., M.Sc (A) Occupational / Industrial Hygienist, Toxicologist (Solvent exposures – hydrocarbons) Air quality (Tropospheric Ozone) / Climate Change Expert Epidemiologist (Communicable and non-communicable diseases) Climatologist & geophysicist (geothermal energy)

My Comment only pertains or is directed at those that failed to read what was written by the original Author:

Follow the Science and practice Critical thinking .

So we all drive electric cars use solar energy and heat pumps for heating and cooling and yet many didn’t read that Solar. Wind. and using the earths temperature all result in unintended consequences along with falling way short of resolving the problem. Is anyone addressing these? Not that I have read and yet people trust the politicians and large companies that produce and profit from all these alternate forms of energy except Atomic. Japan built there reactor on an ocean (unbelievable) .Ever been to a town hall meeting near a large city where inhabits decide to migrate and cut down woodland at an alarming rate? While many homes in those same area’s are in for closure or For Sale. I dont know the answer here But if you think its solar read dangerous battery storage n disposal … Wind Mills that are Placed across leveled mountain tops ect. If you believe our career politicians or the Commercial news as your news and information source. I feel sad for you. I will surely get blasted by many on here as did the author who unlike if not all others actually cited checkable facts. Reread what was written by him. Think it thru logically even if solar and wind could equal the potential of Nuclear Power the associated issues are currently huge. Mean while Im betting many (not all) of you drive large inefficient vehicles and or have gone to battery operated cars/ trucks….that have yet to be shown not to create additional issues. Ask those that have gone with solar panels how much they save…vs the actual cost. I dont claim to have the answers. However Im not disagreeing with what was written. And backed by data. To fix the corporate world we need to sentence the executives that make decisions that cost many life’s in jail for Life … Think about lives lost due to opioid abuse. They are mass murders pure and simple and yes putting one in jail wouldn’t change anything continuing to put the hundreds that sacrifice life’s for profit will change them. Hard jail time in general population. With other Mass Murders . The opioid execs killed more people and I will guess here than all convicted mass murders by many multiples. End of my unorganized rant…

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• ENVIRONMENT

What is nuclear energy and is it a viable resource?

Nuclear energy's future as an electricity source may depend on scientists' ability to make it cheaper and safer.

Nuclear power is generated by splitting atoms to release the energy held at the core, or nucleus, of those atoms. This process, nuclear fission, generates heat that is directed to a cooling agent—usually water. The resulting steam spins a turbine connected to a generator, producing electricity.

About 450 nuclear reactors provide about 11 percent of the world's electricity. The countries generating the most nuclear power are, in order, the United States, France, China, Russia, and South Korea.

The most common fuel for nuclear power is uranium, an abundant metal found throughout the world. Mined uranium is processed into U-235, an enriched version used as fuel in nuclear reactors because its atoms can be split apart easily.

In a nuclear reactor, neutrons—subatomic particles that have no electric charge—collide with atoms, causing them to split. That collision—called nuclear fission—releases more neutrons that react with more atoms, creating a chain reaction. A byproduct of nuclear reactions, plutonium , can also be used as nuclear fuel.

Types of nuclear reactors

In the U.S. most nuclear reactors are either boiling water reactors , in which the water is heated to the boiling point to release steam, or pressurized water reactors , in which the pressurized water does not boil but funnels heat to a secondary water supply for steam generation. Other types of nuclear power reactors include gas-cooled reactors, which use carbon dioxide as the cooling agent and are used in the U.K., and fast neutron reactors, which are cooled by liquid sodium.

Nuclear energy history

The idea of nuclear power began in the 1930s , when physicist Enrico Fermi first showed that neutrons could split atoms. Fermi led a team that in 1942 achieved the first nuclear chain reaction, under a stadium at the University of Chicago. This was followed by a series of milestones in the 1950s: the first electricity produced from atomic energy at Idaho's Experimental Breeder Reactor I in 1951; the first nuclear power plant in the city of Obninsk in the former Soviet Union in 1954; and the first commercial nuclear power plant in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in 1957. ( Take our quizzes about nuclear power and see how much you've learned: for Part I, go here ; for Part II, go here .)

Nuclear power, climate change, and future designs

Nuclear power isn't considered renewable energy , given its dependence on a mined, finite resource, but because operating reactors do not emit any of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming , proponents say it should be considered a climate change solution . National Geographic emerging explorer Leslie Dewan, for example, wants to resurrect the molten salt reactor , which uses liquid uranium dissolved in molten salt as fuel, arguing it could be safer and less costly than reactors in use today.

Others are working on small modular reactors that could be portable and easier to build. Innovations like those are aimed at saving an industry in crisis as current nuclear plants continue to age and new ones fail to compete on price with natural gas and renewable sources such as wind and solar.

The holy grail for the future of nuclear power involves nuclear fusion, which generates energy when two light nuclei smash together to form a single, heavier nucleus. Fusion could deliver more energy more safely and with far less harmful radioactive waste than fission, but just a small number of people— including a 14-year-old from Arkansas —have managed to build working nuclear fusion reactors. Organizations such as ITER in France and Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics are working on commercially viable versions, which so far remain elusive.

Nuclear power risks

When arguing against nuclear power, opponents point to the problems of long-lived nuclear waste and the specter of rare but devastating nuclear accidents such as those at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima Daiichi in 2011 . The deadly Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine happened when flawed reactor design and human error caused a power surge and explosion at one of the reactors. Large amounts of radioactivity were released into the air, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes . Today, the area surrounding the plant—known as the Exclusion Zone—is open to tourists but inhabited only by the various wildlife species, such as gray wolves , that have since taken over .

In the case of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi, the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami caused the plant's catastrophic failures. Several years on, the surrounding towns struggle to recover, evacuees remain afraid to return , and public mistrust has dogged the recovery effort, despite government assurances that most areas are safe.

Other accidents, such as the partial meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island in 1979, linger as terrifying examples of nuclear power's radioactive risks. The Fukushima disaster in particular raised questions about safety of power plants in seismic zones, such as Armenia's Metsamor power station.

Other issues related to nuclear power include where and how to store the spent fuel, or nuclear waste, which remains dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. Nuclear power plants, many of which are located on or near coasts because of the proximity to water for cooling, also face rising sea levels and the risk of more extreme storms due to climate change.

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• NUCLEAR ENERGY
• NUCLEAR WEAPONS
• TOXIC WASTE
• RENEWABLE ENERGY

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What are the Pros and Cons of Nuclear Energy?

Screen captures from embedded Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell videos

How does this align with my curriculum?

Share on: facebook x/twitter linkedin pinterest.

These two “point-counterpoint” videos provide arguments for and against using nuclear energy to generate electricity.

Nuclear energy provides more than 10% of the world’s electricity . That’s almost twice the electricity generated by solar, wind and tidal energy combined. In Canada, nuclear energy provides 16% of the country’s electricity . Ontario produces nearly all of Canada’s nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy is a controversial topic. Some people think it’s too dangerous. Others think it’s a safe and clean alternative to other ways of generating electricity.

We’re going to look at some of the arguments for and against using nuclear energy. Do you know how a nuclear reactor works? If not, this would be a good time to watch this Nuclear Energy Explained video. We've also written an article on the same topic.

What are the arguments against nuclear energy?

Here are the main reasons people are against using nuclear energy to generate electricity.

1. Nuclear Weapons 

In 1945, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki introduced the world to nuclear technology. Even since, people think of weapons of mass destruction when they hear the word “nuclear.” 

Some processes used to generate electricity using nuclear energy can also help build nuclear weapons . Thankfully, most of the world’s countries have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty . It allows just five countries to have nuclear weapons: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Other countries can use nuclear technology to meet their energy needs. But they can’t use it to produce weapons. 

India, Israel and Pakistan have never signed the treaty. All three have nuclear weapons. In recent years, some countries that signed the treaty have threatened to build their own nuclear weapons. These countries include North Korea and Iran . North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2002.

2. Nuclear Waste

Nuclear power plants produce radioactive waste when their fuel is produced, while they operate and when they’re taken down. Managing and getting rid of this waste is a challenge.

About 97% of the radioactive waste is fairly harmless. Most low- or intermediate-level waste loses its radioactivity after just a few days or weeks. It can then be disposed of in the same way as regular waste. 

However, the other 3% is high-level waste . It can remain radioactive for hundreds of years. High-level nuclear waste needs to be kept in a storage facility, far away from people. 

Worldwide, nuclear power plants produce about 34 000 m 3 of high-level waste every year. That’s enough to fill 14 Olympic-sized swimming pools. This waste can remain very hot and radioactive for decades. Even after it cools down, it remains dangerous for thousands or even millions of years. 

Most experts agree that nuclear should be buried hundreds or thousands of metres underground . The US military operates an underground disposal site in Nevada. And Canada is developing a Deep Geological Repository for nuclear waste in Ontario. But most countries have yet to decide how they’ll dispose of their nuclear waste.

Opponents of nuclear power worry that radioactive waste stored underground could leak into groundwater. They are also not convinced that underground waste facilities will remain safe for future generations.

3. Nuclear Accidents 

Since 1952, there have been a number of major nuclear reactor accidents . An accident in Kyshtym , Russia, caused improperly treated waste to explode. In Chernobyl , Ukraine, improperly trained staff caused an explosion. In Fukushima , Japan, there was an explosion after an earthquake and tsunami. 

These accidents released large amounts of radioactive material into the environment. Today, no one is allowed to live in the areas surrounding the damaged reactors. Long-term exposure to low doses of radiation can be very dangerous. It increases the chance that people will eventually develop cancer.

It can be hard to measure the number of deaths and illnesses caused by a nuclear accident. For example, about 50 people died from acute radiation poisoning after the initial explosion at Chernobyl. But the United Nations estimates that the accident will eventually cause 4 000 deaths. Greenpeace puts the number closer to 90 000. The debate on the Chernobyl death toll will likely continue .

What are the arguments for nuclear energy? 

Some people argue that nuclear energy is actually the best way to generate electricity. Here are three arguments in favour of nuclear energy.

1. Nuclear energy is actually very safe 

A 2013 study by NASA found nuclear energy to be far less dangerous than other sources of electricity. In fact, the study estimates that nuclear energy causes the fewest deaths per unit of energy produced.

But what about nuclear accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima? 

Supporters of nuclear energy point out that people are more likely to remember big disasters. We hear a lot about nuclear accidents in the media. But we rarely hear about diseases caused by air pollution. Every year, millions of people die because fossil fuels are burned to produce electricity.

It is also important to remember that facilities like Chernobyl were old and poorly maintained. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) strictly regulates the country’s nuclear power plants. The CNSC works to protect the health and safety of people and the environment. It also makes sure that Canada follows the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

2. Nuclear energy does not pollute the air

Nuclear energy can provide round-the-clock electricity generation without polluting the air. 

Currently, about two-thirds of the world’s electricity is produced by burning fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases into the air. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and nitrous oxides (NO x ).

Like solar and wind energy, nuclear energy generates electricity without releasing greenhouse gases. Of course, greenhouse gases are released when nuclear plants are built. The same is true of solar panels and wind turbines when they’re being built or installed. But overall, greenhouse gas emissions from these facilities are far lower than power plants that burn fossil fuels. 

Nuclear waste is not released into the air. Instead, it is stored in containers under very strict safety guidelines. 

Nuclear power plants can also produce electricity 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In other words, they provide a baseload supply of electricity . Solar and wind energy can supplement baseload power. But they can’t supply electricity when it’s dark or when there’s no wind.

3. Nuclear energy is embracing the future

Existing nuclear reactors were built using technology developed before the 1980s. Back then, the atomic age was in full swing. A lot has changed since then, but scientists and engineers are working hard to update nuclear technology.

For example, nuclear reactors currently run on uranium. But they could soon switch to other types of fuel, like thorium (Th, atomic number 90). Compared to uranium , thorium is more abundant and produces less waste. The waste is also less radioactive. Besides, it’s way more difficult to turn thorium into nuclear weapons .

Did you know?  For more than 50 years, AECL's Chalk River Laboratories have been testing thorium-based fuels. They could soon be used in Canada’s CANDU nuclear reactors .

Basically, debates on nuclear energy are about how dangerous it is. 

Some people focus on how nuclear technology can be used to create weapons. Nuclear power plants also produce harmful waste. Though rare, accidents can be devastating. 

Others see nuclear energy as a lot less dangerous than the alternatives. And in the future, it could make generating electricity even safer. 

Now you’ve seen the arguments for and against nuclear energy. So what do you think? Is it worth the risk? Or should we move away from nuclear energy altogether?

Starting Points

Connecting and relating.

What do you think of when you hear the term “nuclear energy?” Would you support the construction of a nuclear power facility in or near your community? Do you feel safe from the threat of nuclear weapons? Why/why not? Does any of the electricity used in your community come from a nuclear power plant?

Relating Science and Technology to Society and the Environment

• How have nuclear accidents and the development of nuclear weapons influenced how people and governments think about nuclear energy? Explain.
• Do you agree with the statement posed in the video against nuclear energy that “The road to deadly nuclear weapons is always paved with peaceful reactors”? Explain.
• Supporters of nuclear energy state that it is a very safe source of energy when properly regulated. What level of risk, if any, should we consider acceptable with this technology? Explain.
• Does the fact that the generation of electricity from nuclear power plants does not emit carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases mean that it can be considered a source of “green energy”? Explain.  

Exploring Concepts

• What were the short-term and long-term impacts of the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima?
• What are the issues involved with the long-term storage of nuclear waste?
• Where does nuclear waste get stored in Canada?
• Compare and contrast the emissions from a nuclear power plant to those from a coal-based power plant.
• What are some of the advantages of thorium reactors over traditional nuclear reactors?  

Nature of Science/Nature of Technology

• Should more funding be provided to seek scientific solutions to nuclear waste problems? Why/why not?
• What role, if any, should scientists play in helping the public make a reasoned decision for supporting or opposing the development of nuclear energy? Explain.  

Media Literacy

• Does the way nuclear energy is portrayed in the media generate fear or acceptance of this technology? Explain.
• What role does nuclear energy and nuclear weapons play in pop culture? Explain.
• Is the issue of climate change affecting how people or the media perceive nuclear energy? What evidence can you find in the media? 
• Are the positive and negative aspects of nuclear energy given equal treatment by media sources? Why/why not?  

Teaching Suggestions

• This article with embedded videos can be used to support teaching and learning of Physics, Environmental Science, Technology & Engineering, Pollution, Climate Change and Nuclear Energy related to nuclear, radiation, fission & fusion, electricity generation, energy impacts and climate change. Concepts introduced include nuclear weapons, radioactivity, greenhouse gases, thorium and uranium.
• After reading this article and watching the videos, teachers could have students conduct a My Questions Round Robin learning strategy to practice their questioning skills and ask personally relevant questions of the content. Download ready-to-use reproducibles using the My Questions Round Robin learning strategy for this article in [ Google doc ] and [ PDF ]
• To consolidate learning from the content, teachers could have students discuss the positive and negative aspects of building a nuclear power plant using a Pros & Cons Organizer . Download ready-to-use reproducibles using the Pros and Cons Organizer learning strategy for this article in [ Google doc ] and [ PDF ]
• Teachers could also have students consider the concerns of using nuclear power from different perspectives, using an Issues & Stakeholders learning strategy. Download ready-to-use Issues and Stakeholders reproducibles using the learning strategy for this article in [ Google doc ] and [ PDF ]. Download the Issues and Stakeholder sample student response [ PDF ]
• To conclude the lesson and have students reflect on learning, teachers could provide students with an Exit Slip to complete. Download ready-to-use reproducibles using the Exit Slip learning strategy for this article in [ Google doc ] and [ PDF ]  

Nuclear Power in the World Today (2019)

Fact sheet from the World Nuclear Association about the use of nuclear power around the world. Includes stats, graphs, images, and lists. Note that this article was also used as a reference.

The Chernobyl Gallery (2016)

An image gallery of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site 33 years after the accident occurred.

The Safest Source of Energy will Surprise You (2018)

Article on Visual Capitalist by Jeff Desjardins containing information and an infographic about the relative safety of the different forms of energy generation. Note that this article was also used as a reference.

Anti-Defamation League. (n.d.). The Iranian nuclear threat: Why it matters .

Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. (2017, December 8). What is radioactive waste?

Greenpeace. (n.d.). Nuclear waste .

Harrabin, R. (2014, September 12). Friends of the Earth's shift on nuclear should be celebrated, not denied . The Guardian.

Mycio, M. (2013, April 26). How many people have really been killed by Chernobyl? Slate.

Related Topics

Nuclear energy: How environmentally-friendly and safe is it?

• Published 17 March 2023

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced extra support for nuclear power in the Budget.

He wants to reclassify it as "environmentally sustainable" so the industry can access some of the financial incentives available to other forms of renewable energy.

The government wants nuclear power to provide 25% of the UK's electricity needs by 2050.

What is nuclear power?

To generate nuclear power in non-military reactors, uranium atoms are bombarded by much smaller neutron particles.

This causes the atoms to break down in process called nuclear fission, which releases huge amounts of energy as heat.

The heat is used to boil water, producing steam which drives turbines and generates electricity.

• BBC Bitesize: How is nuclear power generated?
• Nuclear fusion breakthrough – what is it and how does it work?

How "green" is nuclear power?

Like fossil fuels, nuclear fuels are non-renewable energy resources, but unlike fossil fuels, nuclear power stations do not produce greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide or methane during their operation.

Building new nuclear plants does create emissions - through manufacturing the steel and other materials needed. But the emissions footprint - the total emissions generated across the lifecycle of a plant - is still very low.

The government will consult on the proposal to reclassify nuclear power as "environmentally sustainable". But the announcement follows a similar move by the EU in 2022 .

• What's in the UK's new energy strategy?
• What does net zero mean?
• Is the UK on track to meet its climate targets?

Is nuclear power safe?

The International Atomic Energy Agency says nuclear power plants are among "the safest and most secure facilities in the world" .

They are subject to stringent international safety standards.

However, there have been a number of high-profile accidents which released large amounts of radioactive material into the environment.

The worst nuclear accident in history was caused by explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine in 1986 . More recently an enormous earthquake caused a tsunami which flooded the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan in 2011, causing a partial meltdown of the reactor cores .

However, even under normal conditions, generating nuclear power produces hazardous radioactive waste, which needs to be safely managed and stored for hundreds of years.

How much nuclear power does the UK use?

There are currently six plants that can supply about 20% of UK electricity demand, with 15.5% generated this way in 2022 .

Most are at the end of their life, but the government wants to deliver up to eight new reactors overall - with one to be approved each year until 2030.

The Hinkley Point C plant is already under construction in Somerset, and in July 2022, the government gave the go-ahead for the Sizewell C nuclear power plant on the Suffolk coast.

Together these will be able to power 12 million homes in the UK.

As well as larger nuclear power stations, the government also wants to develop Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). These work in the same way as conventional nuclear reactors, but on a smaller scale .

The chancellor announced a new competition for SMRs to be delivered through a new body called Great British Nuclear.

If a project proposed is "demonstrated to be viable", he said the government would co-fund it.

How much do nuclear plants cost?

The overall cost of nuclear power is comparable with other forms of energy, but nuclear plants are extremely expensive to build.

The original budget for Hinkley C was £18bn in 2015. It is now expected to cost £33bn at today's prices.

The government hopes a new financial funding model could cut the cost of future nuclear projects, including Sizewell C.

How much will nuclear energy cost consumers?

In 2013, the government agreed to pay £92.50 per megawatt hour for Hinkley Point's electricity, an amount which will rise with inflation.

Although this is much lower than the current price of £161 per megawatt hour , critics argue it's still too much.

In 2019, before the global energy crisis pushed prices up, electricity cost £50 per megawatt hour, so if prices returned to this level, £92.50 would be very expensive.

• Energy price guarantee: What is happening to gas and electricity bills?

How long do nuclear plants take to build?

Critics of nuclear power say the new plants will take so long to come on stream they will be too late to help the UK meet its emissions targets or reduce energy prices for consumers.

Hinkley Point C is two years behind schedule partially due to the pandemic , and Sizewell C is expected to take nine years to construct .

One of the benefits of SMRs is that they are much quicker to construct than larger plants.

Related Topics

• Nuclear power
• Budget 2023

What Does Science Say About the Need for Nuclear?

By Jessica McDonald

Posted on November 1, 2019

While Sen. Bernie Sanders has said “scientists tell us” that it’s possible to go carbon neutral without relying on nuclear power, fellow Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker, who backs the use of some nuclear energy, has said the data is on his side. Who’s right? Both have a point, but neither is telling the full story.

Most experts agree that Sanders is correct that it’s technologically possible to decarbonize the grid without using nuclear power. But many researchers also say keeping nuclear on the table makes decarbonization easier and more likely.

Booker, a New Jersey senator and a former mayor of Newark, has called for reaching “100% clean energy” in the electricity sector by 2030. His plan includes a $20 billion investment in next-generation advanced nuclear research and development by the end of the next decade.

During power generation, nuclear plants release no greenhouse gases, but they come with additional safety, security and waste disposal challenges .

He Said, He Said

The candidates’ divide on nuclear power became apparent on Sept. 4 during CNN’s climate crisis town hall , a two-day event in which the 10 leading Democratic presidential hopefuls were quizzed about their approaches to tackling climate change.

After Sanders was asked about his position on nuclear power by a graduate student in the audience, CNN’s chief climate correspondent, Bill Weir, followed up, pointing out that the U.S. gets 20% of its electricity from nuclear, and France gets about 70% . Referencing the amount of land required for solar and wind, Weir asked how it would be possible to go “carbon neutral without nuclear in the short term.”

“I think you can,” Sanders replied . “And I think the scientists tell us, in fact, that we can.” He went on to mention the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 and 1986’s Chernobyl disaster.

Booker, meanwhile, made his counterclaim hours later. “[N]uclear is more than 50 percent of our non-carbon causing energy,” he said. “So people who think that we can get there without nuclear being part of the blend just aren’t looking at the facts.”

Later, in a Sept. 19 interview with the HuffPost , Booker called out his colleagues who oppose nuclear power, saying, “As much as we say the Republicans when it comes to climate change must listen to science, our party has the same obligation to listen to scientists,” he said. “The data speaks for itself.”

“If we had a president who was going to pull us out of nuclear, we’d be more reliant on fossil fuels,” Booker added. “It’s as simple as that.”

As we’ll explain, there is support for each perspective, although Jesse Jenkins , an energy systems engineer and professor at Princeton University, said both politicians are “making stronger claims than there’s a scientific basis.” Sanders, Jenkins explained, can point to published studies that outline how one can get to zero-carbon without nuclear. “Those exist,” he said. And bolstering Booker’s side, he said, is the “predominance of the evidence” that suggests the most cost-effective way of decarbonizing would include “some nuclear.”

The debate over nuclear energy isn’t limited to Booker and Sanders, even if relatively few Democratic candidates have addressed nuclear power in their climate plans. Former Vice President Joe Biden backs nuclear technology research, as does entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who views nuclear as a “stopgap” measure and plans on having next-gen reactors up and running by 2027.

Although not written into her climate plan , Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said during her town hall segment that she would not build any more nuclear plants and would “start weaning” the country off nuclear energy. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota also committed to not expanding the number of nuclear plants “unless we can find safe storage.”

Without diving into the details of individual plans, we’ll lay out what scientists know about the role of nuclear energy in decarbonizing the electrical grid.

Nuclear Not Necessary

To start, we’ll consider Sanders’ claim that “scientists tell us” that it’s possible to get to a zero-carbon electrical grid without nuclear power.

“The shortest answer is yes, that’s true. Scientists do tell us that we can,” said Drew Shindell , a climate scientist at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

Ryan Jones , an expert in electricity systems and a co-founder of Evolved Energy Research , a consulting company that models low-carbon transitions, agreed. “Anyone who says that nuclear is 100% necessary on a technical basis, I would claim, just hasn’t looked at the alternatives in enough detail,” he said in an email.

Most experts FactCheck.org contacted, including those who think nuclear power should remain an option, said that from a technical perspective, nuclear is not needed to decarbonize the grid.

But technically possible is not the same as practically feasible, or the most cost-effective. In that regard, many, although not all, researchers say nuclear — or something like it — is likely to be necessary to some degree. And even if nuclear is ultimately not needed, they say, the safer strategy is not to exclude it.

“All the evidence says it is possible to decarbonize the energy system in the U.S. without using nuclear power,” said Jones. But, he added, there are cases, such as places that don’t have good wind resources, in which building new nuclear plants can reduce the cost of decarbonizing. Depending on the region, he said, “getting to 100% renewable energy is either very expensive or necessitates significant new transmission to import resources from elsewhere.”

That’s where nuclear can be helpful. It doesn’t have to be nuclear — Jones said carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, for example, would also work. Sanders’ plan, notably, specifically excludes CCS.

Jones also made a point to note that there is a difference between building new nuclear plants, which he said likely wouldn’t be ready to go until after 2030 anyway, and maintaining the nation’s existing reactors. Much of the future of nuclear power depends on the development of advanced technologies, but there is little disagreement that keeping safely operating plants around for as long as possible would be a boon for the climate. “Maintaining our existing fleet is a good way to keep costs low and an accelerated retirement schedule simply makes it that much harder,” he said.

Shindell said that while Sanders is correct in a strict sense, the “more complete” answer is that eliminating nuclear as an option would complicate the effort to decarbonize, requiring the “most extreme” levels of action in other areas to reach the zero-carbon goal. “The more you take away one zero-carbon option,” he said, “the harder you have to push on the others.”

Global Assessments

When scientists have modeled the ways the planet as a whole can avoid the worst effects of climate change — and limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — nuclear power is almost always part of the solution. In the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 special report , scientists described 85 pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, or overshooting that threshold and returning to 1.5 degrees or below by 2100. 

Shindell, who was one of the coordinating lead authors on the chapter , told us that it was a rare scenario that met or mostly met the 1.5 degrees limit and didn’t have nuclear power in the mix. “Very few, almost none in fact, can achieve 1.5 without nuclear,” he said. “It’s a very extreme scenario that can do that. And it requires enormous gains in all the zero-carbon sources.”

A large number of scenarios expanded nuclear power, Shindell said, to around double today’s level. He estimated that 90% of the scenarios included nuclear capacity above today’s level, and just one or two scenarios phased out nuclear entirely by 2100.

There are pathways, the report says, that “no longer see a role for nuclear fission by the end of the century.” But none include no nuclear as early as 2030 or 2050.

Because the scenarios are global, the results don’t necessarily mean that the U.S. must keep or expand its nuclear power. And the scenarios are inherently limited to the types of studies scientists do, Shindell said. Still, the IPCC findings suggest that in a broad sense, most roads to success include nuclear reactors.

Consider, too, the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report from 2014, which was the first to include scenarios that excluded certain technologies. In the nuclear phase out scenario, eight of nine tested scenarios were able to reach the target CO2 concentration level of 430-480 parts per million, or the equivalent of reaching 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But the limitation in technology increased the median costs by 7% (see figure 6.24 and table SPM.2 ). The phase out assumed that existing plants could operate until the end of their lifetime, but did not allow for any new nuclear plants beyond those already under construction.

A 2013 study cited in the 2014 IPCC report used an integrated assessment model to learn what might happen globally if nations stopped building any new nuclear plants in 2020. The authors concluded it was “in principle feasible” to transform the energy system and limit carbon dioxide concentrations to 450 parts per million. But they noted that it would require “massive and rapid expansion” of other low-emissions technology, such as renewables and carbon capture and sequestration.

“This underscores the fact that, in general, nuclear energy can be regarded as a choice rather than a necessity, and different regional and national attitudes toward nuclear energy can be accommodated,” the paper reads. “On the other hand, the forced phase-out of nuclear energy by 2020 would increase the required investments into the energy system transformation and would limit future supply-side flexibility, resulting in comparatively higher costs of CO2.”

Local Assessments

On a more local level, such as for individual countries or regions, scientists can perform much more detailed models of the electrical grid or energy system over space and time to determine the viability of various power mixes and their costs. Sometimes, such models are designed to find the lowest-cost option, while others are set up  to test the robustness of the system.

What’s clear from these modeling efforts is that the clearest and cheapest path forward to decarbonization is to rapidly expand renewable power, especially wind and solar. In a variety of studies, including those from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and others , large amounts of renewable power can be added to the grid without sacrificing reliability and without imposing excessively high costs. But there is some disagreement on how far renewables, on their own, can go. 

One prominent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  in 2015 argued that in the U.S., 100% renewable energy is possible at low cost by 2050-2055. But numerous scientists objected to that analysis, and two separate groups, including one with more than 20 authors, published critiques ; the original authors also penned rebuttals .

Christopher Clack, the lead author of the primary critique and the founder and CEO of Vibrant Clean Energy , a company that does high-resolution electrical grid modeling, says he has yet to be convinced that 100% renewables is possible in the U.S. In his view, the concept is theoretically possible, but unlikely to be feasible in practice.

“We can get all the way within a model, but in reality we probably cannot due to the imperfections of forecasts, dispatch, measurements, etc.,” he said. And for him, cost is not an ancillary issue. “If it is not possible at low-cost, it is not possible in reality,” he said, “because alternatives will be used instead.”

Regardless, each time he’s looked at studies that claim to show a successful 100% renewable grid, he’s found problems. Some models, he said, don’t go into granular enough detail, which can “smear out” challenging times for an all-renewable grid, such as an extreme cold snap. Other papers, he said, rely on unproven technology or unrealistic costs.

The fundamental issue for renewables, of course, is weather variability, and how to handle the times when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. In Clack’s view, this challenge  can mostly — but not fully — be solved by adding storage and creating a more connected and responsive electrical grid. In 2016, while working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Clack published one of the first “supergrid” papers in Nature Climate Change , which showed that by building out high-voltage, direct-current transmission lines, the U.S. could lower its electricity-sector carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 80% below 1990’s level, without an increase in the cost of electricity.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory similarly found that existing renewable technology, coupled with a more flexible grid, “is more than adequate” to supply 80% of the nation’s electricity in 2050.

But to actually provide 100% of the nation’s electricity at a reasonable cost, Clack said there needs to be a non-variable source, which could include — but isn’t limited to — nuclear power.

The importance of including some non-variable sources was also underscored in a 2018 review  co-authored by Princeton’s Jenkins. That paper, which appeared in the journal Joule , reviewed 40 studies published since the IPCC’s 2014 report that explored pathways on either a global or local scale for “deep decarbonization,” defined as an 80%-100% cut in current CO2 emissions. It f ound that all 20 of the studies that took an agnostic approach to finding the most affordable way to go about deep decarbonization ultimately selected a power mix that included at least one low-carbon “firm” resource, such as nuclear power or fossil fuels coupled with CCS.

As Jenkins explained it, while wind and solar can do the bulk of the work, as renewable penetration approaches 100%, problems emerge and costs rise sharply. He told us that most storage — largely lithium-ion batteries — can help with daily variation, but is insufficient for when the sun and wind stall for weeks at a time over a large geographic area, or what’s known as the “dark doldrums.” Adding even more storage capacity might be able to do the trick, he said, but that storage would be expensive to build and rarely used. The economics of such a scenario are bleak. Even assuming costs fall to less than a third of today’s, Jenkins’ review calculated that it would cost more than $7 trillion to build out enough lithium-ion batteries to store a week’s worth of electricity in the U.S. That’s almost 19 times the amount spent on the nation’s electricity over one year.

Not everyone holds this view. Daniel Kammen , a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the school’s Renewable & Appropriate Energy Laboratory , objected to the 2015 PNAS paper, but nevertheless thinks that 100% renewables are an achievable goal. “They are wrong,” he said in an email, adding that 100% clean energy is possible with solar, wind and hydro when supported with storage. Kammen, who is a former science envoy to the State Department under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, did not reply to further questions, but pointed to his lab’s energy system model . In 2016 , his group used the model to evaluate costs under a variety of assumptions for a large swath of western North America to reach a target of 85% below 1990 emissions levels by 2050.

Trieu Mai , a senior energy researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said the science remains unsettled over the economic viability of the various zero-carbon power options.

“I do not believe there has been sufficient analysis to conclusively say which technologies are necessary to reach zero emission power or energy systems,” he said in an email. “There is strong consensus in the literature that growth in renewable energy will be required,” he added, “but the extent of this growth (i.e., whether it should reach 100%) is still under debate.”

In the end, the larger question of how to decarbonize the energy system may come down to differences in philosophy rather than the science, which is not clear-cut, and involves assumptions about the future.

“There isn’t a single scientific truth here,” said Jenkins. “It’s a debate about priorities and feasibility, which is defined in a number of different ways by a number of different parties.”

For Jenkins, though, banking only on solar and wind would be a “mistake.” “Given the high stakes,” he wrote in his 2018 review, “it would be prudent to expand and improve a wide set of clean energy resources, each of which may fill the critical niche for firm, low-carbon power should other technologies falter.”

“If we’re really in a ‘climate crisis,’ then you go to war with your full arsenal,” Jenkins said. “You don’t hold anything back. And you don’t purposefully make this crisis harder by limiting our already limited options.”

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Guest Essay

The Fantasy of Reviving Nuclear Energy

By Stephanie Cooke

Ms. Cooke is a former editor of Nuclear Intelligence Weekly and the author of “In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age.”

World leaders are not unaware of the nuclear industry’s long history of failing to deliver on its promises or of its weakening vital signs. Yet many continue to act as if a nuclear renaissance could be around the corner, even though nuclear energy’s share of global electricity generation has fallen by almost half from its high of roughly 17 percent in 1996.

In search of that revival, representatives from more than 30 countries gathered in Brussels in March at a nuclear summit hosted by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Belgian government. Thirty-four nations, including the United States and China, agreed “to work to fully unlock the potential of nuclear energy,” including extending the lifetimes of existing reactors, building nuclear power plants and deploying advanced reactors.

Yet even as they did so, there was an acknowledgment of the difficulty of their undertaking. “Nuclear technology can play an important role in the clean energy transition,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, told summit attendees. But she added that “the reality today, in most markets, is a reality of a slow but steady decline in market share” for nuclear power.

The numbers underscore that downturn. Solar and wind power together began outperforming nuclear power globally in 2021, and that trend continues as nuclear staggers along. Solar alone added more than 400 gigawatts of capacity worldwide last year, two-thirds more than the previous year. That’s more than the roughly 375 gigawatts of combined capacity of the world’s 415 nuclear reactors, which remained relatively unchanged last year. At the same time, investment in energy storage technology is rapidly accelerating. In 2023, BloombergNEF reported that investors for the first time put more money into stationary energy storage than they did into nuclear.

Still, the drumbeat for nuclear power has become pronounced. At the United Nations climate conference in Dubai in December, the Biden administration persuaded two dozen countries to pledge to triple their nuclear energy capacity by 2050. Those countries included allies of the United States with troubled nuclear programs, most notably France , Britain , Japan and South Korea , whose nuclear bureaucracies will be propped up by the declaration as well as the domestic nuclear industries they are trying to save.

“We are not making the argument to anybody that this is absolutely going to be a sweeping alternative to every other energy source,” John Kerry, the Biden administration climate envoy at the time, said. “But we know because the science and the reality of facts and evidence tell us that you can’t get to net zero 2050 without some nuclear.”

That view has gained traction with energy planners in Eastern Europe who see nuclear as a means of replacing coal, and several countries — including Canada, Sweden, Britain and France — are pushing to extend the operating lifetimes of existing nuclear plants or build additional ones. Some see smaller or more advanced reactors as a means of providing electricity in remote areas or as a means of decarbonizing sectors such as heat, industry and transportation.

So far, most of this remains in early stages, with only three nuclear reactors under construction in Western Europe, two in Britain and one in France, each more than a decade behind schedule. Of the approximately 54 other reactors under construction worldwide as of March, 23 are in China, seven are in India, and three are in Russia, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The total is less than a quarter of the 234 reactors under construction in the peak year of 1979, although 48 of those were later suspended or abandoned.

Even if you agree with Mr. Kerry’s argument, and many energy experts do not, pledging to triple nuclear capacity by 2050 is a little like promising to win the lottery. For the United States, it would mean adding 200 gigawatts of nuclear operating capacity (almost double what the country has ever built) to the current 100 gigawatts or so, generated by more than 90 commercial reactors that have been running an average of 42 years. Globally it would mean tripling the existing capacity built over the past 70 years in less than half that time, in addition to replacing reactors that will shut down before 2050.

The Energy Department estimates the total cost of such an effort in the United States at roughly $700 billion. But David Schlissel , a director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis , has calculated that the two new reactors at the Vogtle plant in Georgia — the only new reactors built in the United States in a generation — on average, cost $21.2 billion per gigawatt in today’s dollars. Using that figure as a yardstick, the cost of building 200 gigawatts of new capacity would be far higher: at least $4 trillion, or $6 trillion if you count the additional cost of replacing existing reactors as they age out.

For much less money and in less time, the world could reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of renewables like solar, wind, hydropower and geothermal power and by transmitting, storing and using electricity more efficiently. A recent analysis by the German Environment Agency examined multiple global climate scenarios in which Paris climate agreement targets are met, and it found that renewable energy “is the crucial and primary driver.”

The logic of this approach was attested to at the climate meeting in Dubai, where more than 120 countries signed a more realistic commitment to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030.

There’s a certain inevitability about the U.S. Energy Department’s latest push for more nuclear energy. An agency predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, brought us Atoms for Peace under President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s in a bid to develop the peaceful side of the atom, hoping it would gain public acceptance of an expanding arsenal of nuclear weapons while supplying electricity too cheap to meter.

Fast-forward 70 years, and you hear a variation on the same theme. Most notably, Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary under President Barack Obama, argues that a vibrant commercial nuclear sector is necessary to sustain U.S. influence in nuclear weapons nonproliferation efforts and global strategic stability. As a policy driver, this argument might explain in part why the government continues to push nuclear power as a climate solution, despite its enormous cost and lengthy delivery time.

China and Russia are conspicuously absent from the list of signatories to the Dubai pledge to triple nuclear power, although China signed the declaration in Brussels. China’s nuclear program is growing faster than that of any other country, and Russia dominates the global export market for reactors with projects in countries new to commercial nuclear energy, such as Turkey, Egypt and Bangladesh, as well as Iran.

Pledges and declarations on a global stage allow world leaders a platform to be seen to be doing something to address climate change, even if, as is the case with nuclear, they lack the financing and infrastructure to succeed. But their support most likely means that substantial sums of money — much of it from taxpayers and ratepayers — will be wasted on perpetuating the fantasy that nuclear energy will make a difference in a meaningful time frame to slow global warming.

The U.S. government is already poised to spend billions of dollars building small modular and advanced reactors and keeping aging large ones running. But two such small reactor projects based on conventional technologies have already failed. Which raises the question: Will future projects based on far more complex technologies be more viable? Money for such projects — provided mainly under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act — could be redirected in ways that do more for the climate and do it faster, particularly if planned new nuclear projects fail to materialize.

There is already enough potential generation capacity in the United States seeking access to the grid to come close to achieving President Biden’s 2035 goal of a zero-carbon electricity sector, and 95 percent of it is solar, battery storage and wind. But these projects face a hugely constrained transmission system, regulatory and financial roadblocks and entrenched utility interests, enough to prevent many of them from ever providing electricity, according to a report released last year by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Even so, existing transmission capacity can be doubled by retrofitting transmission lines with advanced conductors, which would offer at least a partial way out of the gridlock for renewables, in addition to storage, localized distribution and improved management of supply and demand.

What’s missing are leaders willing to buck their own powerful nuclear bureaucracies and choose paths that are far cheaper, less dangerous and quicker to deploy. Without them, we are doomed to more promises and wasteful spending by nuclear proponents who have repeatedly shown that they can talk but can’t deliver.

Stephanie Cooke is a former editor of Nuclear Intelligence Weekly and the author of “In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Fact check: Is nuclear energy good for the climate?

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?

The latest figures on global carbon dioxide emissions call into question the world's efforts to tackle the climate crisis. CO2 emissions are set to soar 4.9% in 2021 , compared with the previous year, according to a study published earlier this month by the Global Carbon Project (GCP), a group of scientists that track emissions.

In 2020, emissions dropped 5.4% due to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. Most observers expected a rebound this year — but not to such an extent. The energy sector continues to be the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, with a share of 40% — and rising.

But what about nuclear ? Supporters of the controversial energy source say it's a climate-friendly way to generate electricity. At the very least, it's something we could use until we're able to develop comprehensive alternatives . In recent weeks, particularly during the COP26 climate summit , advocates have been creating a stir online with statements like "if you're against nuclear energy, you're against climate protection" and " nuclear energy is about to make a comeback." But is there anything to it?

Explainer: Nuclear power to the rescue?

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Is nuclear power a zero-emissions energy source?

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.

And yet, interest groups claim nuclear energy is emission-free. Among them is Austrian consulting firm ENCO. In late 2020, it released a study prepared for the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy that looked favorably at the possible future role of nuclear in the Netherlands.

"The main factors for its choice were reliability and security of supply, with no CO2 emission," it read. ENCO was founded by experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency, and it regularly works with stakeholders in the nuclear sector, so it's not entirely free of vested interests.

At COP26, environmental initiative Scientists for Future (S4F) presented a paper on nuclear energy and the climate. The group came to a very different conclusion. "Taking into account the current overall energy system, nuclear energy is by no means CO2 neutral ," they said. 

Ben Wealer of the Technical University of Berlin, one of the report's authors, told DW that proponents of nuclear energy "fail to take into account many factors," including those sources of emissions outlined above. All the studies reviewed by DW said the same thing: Nuclear power is not emissions-free.

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. It should be noted, however, that WISE is an anti-nuclear group, so is not entirely unbiased.

However, other studies have come up with similar results when considering entire life cycles. Mark Z. Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere / Energy Program at California's Stanford University, calculated a climate cost of 68 to 180 grams of CO2/kWh, depending on the electricity mix used in uranium production and other variables.

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.

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."

Mycle Schneider, author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report , agrees.

"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.

Nuclear funding could go toward renewables

Due to the high costs associated with nuclear energy, it also blocks important financial resources that could instead be used to develop renewable energy, said Jan Haverkamp, a nuclear expert and activist with environment NGO Greenpeace in the Netherlands. Those renewables would provide more energy that is both faster and cheaper than nuclear, he said.

" Every dollar invested in nuclear energy is therefore a dollar diverted from true urgent climate action. In that sense, nuclear power is not climate-friendly," he said.

In addition, nuclear energy itself has been affected by climate change. During the world's increasingly hot summers, several nuclear power plants have already had to be temporarily shut down or taken off the grid. Power plants depend on nearby water sources to cool their reactors, and with many rivers drying up, those sources of water are no longer guaranteed.

The much vaunted "renaissance of nuclear power" is anything but when all the facts are taken into consideration, Mycle Schneider told DW. He said the nuclear industry has been shrinking for years.

"In the last 20 years, 95 nuclear power plants have gone online and 98 have been shut down. If you take China out of the equation, the number of nuclear power plants has shrunk by 50 reactors in the last two decades," Schneider added. "The nuclear industry is not thriving."

Additional reporting by Jo Harper and Gero Rueter

This article was translated from German by Martin Kübler 

Correction, November 30, 2021: A previous version of this article unintentionally omitted one of two sources in the graphic 'How does electricity affect the environment?'. The Umweltbundesamt and WISE are the sources of the data. DW apologizes for the error.

Explore more

Possible role of nuclear in the dutch energy mix in the future (pdf), related topics.

Nuclear Power: Technical and Institutional Options for the Future (1992)

Chapter: 5 conclusions and recommendations, conclusions and recommendations.

The Committee was requested to analyze the technological and institutional alternatives to retain an option for future U.S. nuclear power deployment.

A premise of the Senate report directing this study is “that nuclear fission remains an important option for meeting our electric energy requirements and maintaining a balanced national energy policy.” The Committee was not asked to examine this premise, and it did not do so. The Committee consisted of members with widely ranging views on the desirability of nuclear power. Nevertheless, all members approached the Committee's charge from the perspective of what would be necessary if we are to retain nuclear power as an option for meeting U.S. electric energy requirements, without attempting to achieve consensus on whether or not it should be retained. The Committee's conclusions and recommendations should be read in this context.

The Committee's review and analyses have been presented in previous chapters. Here the Committee consolidates the conclusions and recommendations found in the previous chapters and adds some additional conclusions and recommendations based upon some of the previous statements. The Committee also includes some conclusions and recommendations that are not explicitly based upon the earlier chapters but stem from the considerable experience of the Committee members.

Most of the following discussion contains conclusions. There also are a few recommendations. Where the recommendations appear they are identified as such by bold italicized type.

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

In 1989, nuclear plants produced about 19 percent of the United States ' electricity, 77 percent of France's electricity, 26 percent of Japan's electricity, and 33 percent of West Germany's electricity. However, expansion of commercial nuclear energy has virtually halted in the United States. In other countries, too, growth of nuclear generation has slowed or stopped. The reasons in the United States include reduced growth in demand for electricity, high costs, regulatory uncertainty, and public opinion. In the United States, concern for safety, the economics of nuclear power, and waste disposal issues adversely affect the general acceptance of nuclear power.

Electricity Demand

Estimated growth in summer peak demand for electricity in the United States has fallen from the 1974 projection of more than 7 percent per year to a relatively steady level of about 2 percent per year. Plant orders based on the projections resulted in cancellations, extended construction schedules, and excess capacity during much of the 1970s and 1980s. The excess capacity has diminished in the past five years, and ten year projections (at approximately 2 percent per year) suggest a need for new capacity in the 1990s and beyond. To meet near-term anticipated demand, bidding by non-utility generators and energy efficiency providers is establishing a trend for utilities acquiring a substantial portion of this new generating capacity from others. Reliance on non-utility generators does not now favor large scale baseload technologies.

Nuclear power plants emit neither precursors to acid rain nor gases that contribute to global warming, like carbon dioxide. Both of these environmental issues are currently of great concern. New regulations to address these issues will lead to increases in the costs of electricity produced by combustion of coal, one of nuclear power's main competitors. Increased costs for coal-generated electricity will also benefit alternate energy sources that do not emit these pollutants.

Major deterrents for new U.S. nuclear plant orders include high capital carrying charges, driven by high construction costs and extended construction times, as well as the risk of not recovering all construction costs.

Construction Costs

Construction costs are hard to establish, with no central source, and inconsistent data from several sources. Available data show a wide range of costs for U.S. nuclear plants, with the most expensive costing three times more (in dollars per kilowatt electric) than the least expensive in the same year of commercial operation. In the post-Three Mile Island era, the cost increases have been much larger. Considerable design modification and retrofitting to meet new regulations contributed to cost increases. From 1971 to 1980, the most expensive nuclear plant (in constant dollars) increased by 30 percent. The highest cost for a nuclear plant beginning commercial operation in the United States was twice as expensive (in constant dollars) from 1981 to 1984 as it was from 1977 to 1980.

Construction Time

Although plant size also increased, the average time to construct a U.S. nuclear plant went from about 5 years prior to 1975 to about 12 years from 1985 to 1989. U.S. construction times are much longer than those in other major nuclear countries, except for the United Kingdom. Over the period 1978 to 1989, the U.S. average construction time was nearly twice that of France and more than twice that of Japan.

Billions of dollars in disallowances of recovery of costs from utility ratepayers have made utilities and the financial community leery of further investments in nuclear power plants. During the 1980s, rate base disallowances by state regulators totaled about $14 billion for nuclear plants, but only about $0.7 billion for non-nuclear plants.

Operation and maintenance (O&M) costs for U.S. nuclear plants have increased faster than for coal plants. Over the decade of the 1980s, U.S. nuclear O&M-plus-fuel costs grew from nearly half to about the same as those for fossil fueled plants, a significant shift in relative advantage.

Performance

On average, U.S. nuclear plants have poorer capacity factors compared to those of plants in other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. On a lifetime basis, the United States is barely above 60 percent capacity factor, while France and Japan are at 68 percent, and West Germany is at 74 percent. Moreover, through 1988 12 U.S. plants were in the bottom 22. However, some U.S. plants do very well: 3 of the top 22 OECD plants through 1988 were U.S. U.S. plants averaged 65 percent in 1988, 63 percent in 1989, and 68 percent in 1990.

Except for capacity factors, the performance indicators of U.S. nuclear plants have improved significantly over the past several years. If the industry is to achieve parity with the operating performance in other countries, it must carefully examine its failure to achieve its own goal in this area and develop improved strategies, including better management practices. Such practices are important if the generators are to develop confidence that the new generation of plants can achieve the higher load factors estimated by the vendors.

Public Attitudes

There has been substantial opposition to new plants. The failure to solve the high-level radioactive waste disposal problem has harmed nuclear power's public image. It is the Committee's opinion, based upon our experience, that, more recently, an inability of states, that are members of regional compact commissions, to site low-level radioactive waste facilities has also harmed nuclear power's public image.

Several factors seem to influence the public to have a less than positive attitude toward new nuclear plants:

no perceived urgency for new capacity;

nuclear power is believed to be more costly than alternatives;

concerns that nuclear power is not safe enough;

little trust in government or industry advocates of nuclear power;

concerns about the health effects of low-level radiation;

concerns that there is no safe way to dispose of high-level waste; and

concerns about proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The Committee concludes that the following would improve public opinion of nuclear power:

a recognized need for a greater electrical supply that can best be met by large plants;

economic sanctions or public policies imposed to reduce fossil fuel burning;

maintaining the safe operation of existing nuclear plants and informing the public;

providing the opportunity for meaningful public participation in nuclear power issues, including generation planning, siting, and oversight;

better communication on the risk of low-level radiation;

resolving the high-level waste disposal issue; and

assurance that a revival of nuclear power would not increase proliferation of nuclear weapons.

As a result of operating experience, improved O&M training programs, safety research, better inspections, and productive use of probabilistic risk analysis, safety is continually improved. The Committee concludes that the risk to the health of the public from the operation of current reactors in the United States is very small. In this fundamental sense, current reactors are safe. However, a significant segment of the public has a different perception and also believes that the level of safety can and should be increased. The

development of advanced reactors is in part an attempt to respond to this public attitude.

Institutional Changes

The Committee believes that large-scale deployment of new nuclear power plants will require significant changes by both industry and government.

One of the most important factors affecting the future of nuclear power in the United States is its cost in relation to alternatives and the recovery of these capital and operating charges through rates that are charged for the electricity produced. Chapter 2 of this report deals with these issues in some detail. As stated there, the industry must develop better methods for managing the design and construction of nuclear plants. Arrangements among the participants that would assure timely, economical, and high-quality construction of new nuclear plants, the Committee believes, will be prerequisites to an adequate degree of assurance of capital cost recovery from state regulatory authorities in advance of construction. The development of state prudency laws also can provide a positive response to this issue.

The Committee and others are well aware of the increases in nuclear plant construction and operating costs over the last 20 years and the extension of plant construction schedules over this same period. 1 The Committee believes there are many reasons for these increases but is unable to disaggregate the cost effect among these reasons with any meaningful precision.

Like others, the Committee believes that the financial community and the generators must both be satisfied that significant improvements can be achieved before new plants can be ordered. In addition, the Committee believes that greater confidence in the control of costs can be realized with plant designs that are more nearly complete before construction begins, plants that are easier to construct, use of better construction and management methods, and business arrangements among the participants that provide stronger incentives for cost-effective, timely completion of projects.

It is the Committee's opinion, based upon our experience, that the principal participants in the nuclear industry--utilities, architect-engineers, and suppliers –should begin now to work out the full range of contractual arrangements for advanced nuclear power plants. Such arrangements would

increase the confidence of state regulatory bodies and others that the principal participants in advanced nuclear power plant projects will be financially accountable for the quality, timeliness, and economy of their products and services.

Inadequate management practices have been identified at some U.S. utilities, large and small public and private. Because of the high visibility of nuclear power and the responsibility for public safety, a consistently higher level of demonstrated utility management practices is essential before the U.S. public's attitude about nuclear power is likely to improve.

Over the past decade, utilities have steadily strengthened their ability to be responsible for the safety of their plants. Their actions include the formation and support of industry institutions, including the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO). Self-assessment and peer oversight through INPO are acknowledged to be strong and effective means of improving the performance of U.S. nuclear power plants. The Committee believes that such industry self-improvement, accountability, and self-regulation efforts improve the ability to retain nuclear power as an option for meeting U.S. electric energy requirements. The Committee encourages industry efforts to reduce reliance on the adversarial approach to issue resolution.

It is the Committee's opinion, based upon our experience, that the nuclear industry should continue to take the initiative to bring the standards of every American nuclear plant up to those of the best plants in the United States and the world. Chronic poor performers should be identified publicly and should face the threat of insurance cancellations. Every U.S. nuclear utility should continue its full-fledged participation in INPO; any new operators should be required to become members through insurance prerequisites or other institutional mechanisms.

Standardization. The Committee views a high degree of standardization as very important for the retention of nuclear power as an option for meeting U.S. electric energy requirements. There is not a uniformly accepted definition of standardization. The industry, under the auspices of the Nuclear Power Oversight Committee, has developed a position paper on standardization that provides definitions of the various phases of standardization and expresses an industry commitment to standardization. The Committee believes that a strong and sustained commitment by the principal participants will be required to realize the potential benefits of standardization (of families of plants) in the diverse U.S. economy. It is the Committee's opinion, based upon our experience, that the following will be necessary:

Families of standardized plants will be important for ensuring the highest levels of safety and for realizing the potential economic benefits of new nuclear plants. Families of standardized plants will allow standardized approaches to plant modification, maintenance, operation, and training.

Customers, whether utilities or other entities, must insist on standardization before an order is placed, during construction, and throughout the life of the plant.

Suppliers must take standardization into account early in planning and marketing. Any supplier of standardized units will need the experience and resources for a long-term commitment.

Antitrust considerations will have to be properly taken into account to develop standardized plants.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission

An obstacle to continued nuclear power development has been the uncertainties in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) licensing process. Because the current regulatory framework was mainly intended for light water reactors (LWR) with active safety systems and because regulatory standards were developed piecemeal over many years, without review and consolidation, the regulations should be critically reviewed and modified (or replaced with a more coherent body of regulations) for advanced reactors of other types. The Committee recommends that NRC comprehensively review its regulations to prepare for advance reactors, in particular. LWRs with passive safety features. The review should proceed from first principles to develop a coherent, consistent set of regulations.

The Committee concludes that NRC should improve the quality of its regulation of existing and future nuclear power plants, including tighter management controls over all of its interactions with licensees and consistency of regional activities. Industry has proposed such to NRC.

The Committee encourages efforts by NRC to reduce reliance on the adversarial approach to issue resolution. The Committee recommends that NRC encourage industry self-improvement, accountability, and self-regulation initia tives . While federal regulation plays an important safety role, it must not be allowed to detract from or undermine the accountability of utilities and their line management organizations for the safety of their plants.

It is the Committee's expectation that economic incentive programs instituted by state regulatory bodies will continue for nuclear power plant operators. Properly formulated and administered, these programs should improve the economic performance of nuclear plants, and they may also enhance safety. However, they do have the potential to provide incentives counter to safety. The Committee believes that such programs should focus

on economic incentives and avoid incentives that can directly affect plant safety. On July 18, 1991 NRC issued a Nuclear Regulatory Commission Policy Statement which expressed concern that such incentive programs may adversely affect safety and commits NRC to monitoring such programs. A joint industry/state study of economic incentive programs could help assure that such programs do not interfere with the safe operation of nuclear power plants.

It is the Committee's opinion, based upon our experience, that NRC should continue to exercise its federally mandated preemptive authority over the regulation of commercial nuclear power plant safety if the activities of state government agencies (or other public or private agencies) run counter to nuclear safety. Such activities would include those that individually or in the aggregate interfere with the ability of the organization with direct responsibility for nuclear plant safety (the organization licensed by the Commission to operate the plant) to meet this responsibility. The Committee urges close industry-state cooperation in the safety area.

It is also the Committee's opinion, based upon our experience, that the industry must have confidence in the stability of NRC's licensing process. Suppliers and utilities need assurance that licensing has become and will remain a manageable process that appropriately limits the late introduction of new issues.

It is likely that, if the possibility of a second hearing before a nuclear plant can be authorized to operate is to be reduced or eliminated, legislation will be necessary. The nuclear industry is convinced that such legislation will be required to increase utility and investor confidence to retain nuclear power as an option for meeting U.S. electric energy requirements. The Committee concurs.

It is the Committee's opinion, based upon our experience, that potential nuclear power plant sponsors must not face large unanticipated cost increases as a result of mid-course regulatory changes, such as backfits. NRC 's new licensing rule, 10 CFR Part 52, provides needed incentives for standardized designs.

Industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

The U.S. system of nuclear regulation is inherently adversarial, but mitigation of unnecessary tension in the relations between NRC and its nuclear power licensees would, in the Committee's opinion, improve the regulatory environment and enhance public health and safety. Thus, the Committee commends the efforts by both NRC and the industry to work

more cooperatively together and encourages both to continue and strengthen these efforts.

Department of Energy

Lack of resolution of the high-level waste problem jeopardizes future nuclear power development. The Committee believes that the legal status of the Yucca Mountain site for a geologic repository should be resolved soon, and that the Department of Energy's (DOE) program to investigate this site should be continued. In addition, a contingency plan must be developed to store high-level radioactive waste in surface storage facilities pending the availability of the geologic repository.

Environmental Protection Agency

The problems associated with establishing a high-level waste site at Yucca Mountain are exacerbated by the requirement that, before operation of a repository begins, DOE must demonstrate to NRC that the repository will perform to standards established by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). NRC's staff has strongly questioned the workability of these quantitative requirements, as have the National Research Council's Radioactive Waste Management Board and others. The Committee concludes that the EPA standard for disposal of high-level waste will have to be reevaluated to ensure that a standard that is both adequate and feasible is applied to the geologic waste repository.

Administration and Congress

The Price-Anderson Act will expire in 2002. The Committee sought to discover whether or not such protection would be required for advanced reactors. The clear impression the Committee received from industry representatives was that some such protection would continue to be needed, although some Committee members believe that this was an expression of desire rather than of need. At the very least, renewal of Price-Anderson in 2002 would be viewed by the industry as a supportive action by Congress and would eliminate the potential disruptive effect of developing alternative liability arrangements with the insurance industry. Failure to renew Price-Anderson in 2002 would raise a new impediment to nuclear power plant orders as well as possibly reduce an assured source of funds to accident victims.

The Committee believes that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) approach to safety investigations, as a substitute for the present NRC approach, has merit. In view of the infrequent nature of the activities of such a committee, it may be feasible for it to be established on an ad hoc basis and report directly to the NRC chairman. Therefore, the Committee recommends that such a small safety review entity be established. Before the establishment of such an activity, its charter should be carefully defined, along with a clear delineation of the classes of accidents it would investigate. Its location in the government and its reporting channels should also be specified. The function of this group would parallel those of NTSB. Specifically, the group would conduct independent public investigations of serious incidents and accidents at nuclear power plants and would publish reports evaluating the causes of these events. This group would have only a small administrative structure and would bring in independent experts, including those from both industry and government, to conduct its investigations.

It is the Committee's opinion, based upon our experience, that responsible arrangements must be negotiated between sponsors and economic regulators to provide reasonable assurances of complete cost recovery for nuclear power plant sponsors. Without such assurances, private investment capital is not likely to flow to this technology.

In Chapter 2 , the Committee addressed the non-recovery of utility costs in rate proceedings and concluded that better methods of dealing with this issue must be established. The Committee was impressed with proposals for periodic reviews of construction progress and costs--“rolling prudency” determinations--as one method for managing the risks of cost recovery. The Committee believes that enactment of such legislation could remove much of the investor risk and uncertainty currently associated with state regulatory treatment of new power plant construction, and could therefore help retain nuclear power as an option for meeting U.S. electric energy requirements.

On balance, however, unless many states adopt this or similar legislation, it is the Committee's view that substantial assurances probably cannot be given, especially in advance of plant construction, that all costs incurred in building nuclear plants will be allowed into rate bases.

The Committee notes the current trend toward economic deregulation of electric power generation. It is presently unclear whether this trend is compatible with substantial additions of large-scale, utility-owned, baseload generating capacity, and with nuclear power plants in particular.

It is the Committee's opinion, based upon our experience, that regional low-level radioactive waste compact commissions must continue to establish disposal sites.

The institutional challenges are clearly substantial. If they are to be met, the Committee believes that the Federal government must decide, as a matter of national policy, whether a strong and growing nuclear power program is vital to the economic, environmental, and strategic interests of the American people. Only with such a clearly stated policy, enunciated by the President and backed by the Congress through appropriate statutory changes and appropriations, will it be possible to effect the institutional changes necessary to return the flow of capital and human resources required to properly employ this technology.

Alternative Reactor Technologies

Advanced reactors are now in design or development. They are being designed to be simpler, and, if design goals are realized, these plants will be safer than existing reactors. The design requirements for the advanced reactors are more stringent than the NRC safety goal policy. If final safety designs of advanced reactors, and especially those with passive safety features, are as indicated to this Committee, an attractive feature of them should be the significant reduction in system complexity and corresponding improvement in operability. While difficult to quantify, the benefit of improvements in the operator 's ability to monitor the plant and respond to system degradations may well equal or exceed that of other proposed safety improvements.

The reactor concepts assessed by the Committee were the large evolutionary LWRs, the mid-sized LWRs with passive safety features, 2 the Canadian deuterium uranium (CANDU) heavy water reactor, the modular high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (MHTGR), the safe integral reactor (SIR), the process inherent ultimate safety (PIUS) reactor, and the liquid metal reactor (LMR). The Committee developed the following criteria for comparing these reactor concepts:

safety in operation;

economy of construction and operation;

suitability for future deployment in the U.S. market;

fuel cycle and environmental considerations;

safeguards for resistance to diversion and sabotage;

technology risk and development schedule; and

amenability to efficient and predictable licensing.

With regard to advanced designs, the Committee reached the following conclusions.

Large Evolutionary Light Water Reactors

The large evolutionary LWRs offer the most mature technology. The first standardized design to be certified in the United States is likely to be an evolutionary LWR. The Committee sees no need for federal research and development (R&D) funding for these concepts, although federal funding could accelerate the certification process.

Mid-sized Light Water Reactors with Passive Safety Features

The mid-sized LWRs with passive safety features are designed to be simpler, with modular construction to reduce construction times and costs, and to improve operations. They are likely the next to be certified.

Because there is no experience in building such plants, cost projections for the first plant are clearly uncertain. To reduce the economic uncertainties it will be necessary to demonstrate the construction technology and improved operating performance. These reactors differ from current reactors in construction approach, plant configuration, and safety features. These differences do not appear so great as to require that a first plant be built for NRC certification. While a prototype in the traditional sense will not be required, the Committee concludes that no first-plant mid-sized LWR with passive safety features is likely to be certified and built without government incentives, in the form of shared funding or financial guarantees.

CANDU Heavy Water Reactor

The Committee judges that the CANDU ranks below the advanced mid-sized LWRs in market potential. The CANDU-3 reactor is farther along in design than the mid-sized LWRs with passive safety features. However, it has not entered NRC's design certification process. Commission requirements are complex and different from those in Canada so that U.S. certification

could be a lengthy process. However, the CANDU reactor can probably be licensed in this century.

The heavy water reactor is a mature design, and Canadian entry into the U.S. marketplace would give added insurance of adequate nuclear capacity if it is needed in the future. But the CANDU does not offer advantages sufficient to justify U.S. government assistance to initiate and conduct its licensing review.

Modular High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor

The MHTGR posed a difficult set of questions for the Committee. U.S. and foreign experience with commercial gas-cooled reactors has not been good. A consortium of industry and utility people continue to promote federal funding and to express interest in the concept, while none has committed to an order.

The reactor, as presently configured, is located below ground level and does not have a conventional containment. The basic rationale of the designers is that a containment is not needed because of the safety features inherent in the properties of the fuel.

However, the Committee was not convinced by the presentations that the core damage frequency for the MHTGR has been demonstrated to be low enough to make a containment structure unnecessary. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimates that data to confirm fuel performance will not be available before 1994. The Committee believes that reliance on the defense-in-depth concept must be retained, and accurate evaluation of safety will require evaluation of a detailed design.

A demonstration plant for the MHTGR could be licensed slightly after the turn of the century, with certification following demonstration of successful operation. The MHTGR needs an extensive R&D program to achieve commercial readiness in the early part of the next century. The construction and operation of a first plant would likely be required before design certification. Recognizing the opposite conclusion of the MHTGR proponents, the Committee was not convinced that a foreseeable commercial market exists for MHTGR-produced process heat, which is the unique strategic capability of the MHTGR. Based on the Committee 's view on containment requirements, and the economics and technology issues, the Committee judged the market potential for the MHTGR to be low.

The Committee believes that no funds should be allocated for development of high-temperature gas-cooled reactor technology within the commercial nuclear power development budget of DOE.

Safe Integral Reactor and Process Inherent Ultimate Safety Reactor

The other advanced light water designs the Committee examined were the United Kingdom and U.S. SIR and the Swedish PIUS reactor.

The Committee believes there is no near-term U.S. market for SIR and PIUS. The development risks for SIR and PIUS are greater than for the other LWRs and CANDU-3. The lack of operational and regulatory experience for these two is expected to significantly delay their acceptance by utilities. SIR and PIUS need much R&D, and a first plant will probably be required before design certification is approved.

The Committee concluded that no Federal funds should be allocated for R&D on SIR or PIUS.

Liquid Metal Reactor

LMRs offer advantages because of their potential ability to provide a long-term energy supply through a nearly complete use of uranium resources. Were the nuclear option to be chosen, and large scale deployment follow, at some point uranium supplies at competitive prices might be exhausted. Breeder reactors offer the possibility of extending fissionable fuel supplies well past the next century. In addition, actinides, including those from LWR spent fuel, can undergo fission without significantly affecting performance of an advanced LMR, transmuting the actinides to fission products, most of which, except for technetium, carbon, and some others of little import, have half-lives very much shorter than the actinides. (Actinides are among the materials of greatest concern in nuclear waste disposal beyond about 300 years.) However, substantial further research is required to establish (1) the technical and the economic feasibility of recycling in LMRs actinides recovered from LWR spent fuel, and (2) whether high-recovery recycling of transuranics and their transmutation can, in fact, benefit waste disposal. Assuming success, it would still be necessary to dispose of high-level waste, although the waste would largely consist of significantly shorter-lived fission products. Special attention will be necessary to ensure that the LMR's reprocessing facilities are not vulnerable to sabotage or to theft of plutonium.

The unique property of the LMR, fuel breeding, might lead to a U.S. market, but only in the long term. From the viewpoint of commercial licensing, it is far behind the evolutionary and mid-sized LWRs with passive safety features in having a commercial design available for review. A federally funded program, including one or more first plants, will be required before any LMR concept would be accepted by U.S. utilities.

Net Assessment

The Committee could not make any meaningful quantitative comparison of the relative safety of the various advanced reactor designs. The Committee believes that each of the concepts considered can be designed and operated to meet or closely approach the safety objectives currently proposed for future, advanced LWRs. The different advanced reactor designs employ different mixes of active and passive safety features. The Committee believes that there currently is no single optimal approach to improved safety. Dependence on passive safety features does not, of itself, ensure greater safety. The Committee believes that a prudent design course retains the historical defense-in-depth approach.

The economic projections are highly uncertain, first, because past experience suggests higher costs, longer construction times, and lower availabilities than projected and, second, because of different assumptions and levels of maturity among the designs. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) data, which the Committee believes to be more reliable than that of the vendors, indicate that the large evolutionary LWRs are likely to be the least costly to build and operate on a cost per kilowatt electric or kilowatt hour basis, while the high-temperature gas-cooled reactors and LMRs are likely to be the most expensive. EPRI puts the mid-sized LWRs with passive safety features between the two extremes.

Although there are definite differences in the fuel cycle characteristics of the advanced reactors, fuel cycle considerations did not offer much in the way of discrimination among reactors, nor did safeguards and security considerations, particularly for deployment in the United States. However, the CANDU (with on-line refueling and heavy water) and the LMR (with reprocessing) will require special attention to safeguards.

SIR, MHTGR, PIUS, and LMR are not likely to be deployed for commercial use in the United States, at least within the next 20 years. The development required for commercialization of any of these concepts is substantial.

It is the Committee's overall assessment that the large evolutionary LWRs and the mid-sized LWRs with passive safety features rank highest relative to the Committee 's evaluation criteria. The evolutionary reactors could be ready for deployment by 2000, and the mid-sized could be ready for initial plant construction soon after 2000. The Committee's evaluations and overall assessment are summarized in Figure 5-1 .

FIGURE 5.1 Assessment of advanced reactor technologies.

This table is an attempt to summarize the Committee's qualitative rankings of selected reactor types against each other , without reference either to an absolute standard or to the performance of any other energy resource options, This evaluation was based on the Committee's professional judgment.

The Committee has concluded the following:

Safety and cost are the most important characteristics for future nuclear power plants.

LWRs of the large evolutionary and the mid-sized advanced designs offer the best potential for competitive costs (in that order).

Safety benefits among all reactor types appear to be about equal at this stage in the design process. Safety must be achieved by attention to all failure modes and levels of design by a multiplicity of safety barriers and features. Consequently, in the absence of detailed engineering design and because of the lack of construction and operating experience with the actual concepts, vendor claims of safety superiority among conceptual designs cannot be substantiated.

LWRs can be deployed to meet electricity production needs for the first quarter of the next century:

The evolutionary LWRs are further developed and, because of international projects, are most complete in design. They are likely to be the first plants certified by NRC. They are expected to be the first of the advanced reactors available for commercial use and could operate in the 2000 to 2005 time frame. Compared to current reactors, significant improvements in safety appear likely. Compared to recently completed high-cost reactors, significant improvements also appear possible in cost if institutional barriers are resolved. While little or no federal funding is deemed necessary to complete the process, such funding could accelerate the process.

Because of the large size and capital investment of evolutionary reactors, utilities that might order nuclear plants may be reluctant to do so. If nuclear power plants are to be available to a broader range of potential U.S. generators, the development of the mid-sized plants with passive safety features is important. These reactors are progressing in their designs, through DOE and industry funding, toward certification in the 1995 to 2000 time frame. The Committee believes such funding will be necessary to complete the process. While a prototype in the traditional sense will not be required, federal funding will likely be required for the first mid-sized LWR with passive safety features to be ordered.

Government incentives, in the form of shared funding or financial guarantees, would likely accelerate the next order for a light water plant. The Committee has not addressed what type of government assistance should be provided nor whether the first advanced light water plant should be a large evolutionary LWR or a mid-sized passive LWR.

The CANDU-3 reactor is relatively advanced in design but represents technology that has not been licensed in the United States. The Committee did not find compelling reasons for federal funding to the vendor to support the licensing.

SIR and PIUS, while offering potentially attractive safety features, are unlikely to be ready for commercial use until after 2010. This alone may limit their market potential. Funding priority for research on these reactor systems is considered by the Committee to be low.

MHTGRs also offer potential safety features and possible process heat applications that could be attractive in the market place. However, based on the extensive experience base with light water technology in the United States, the lack of success with commercial use of gas technology, the likely higher costs of this technology compared with the alternatives, and the substantial development costs that are still required before certification, 3 the Committee concluded that the MHTGR had a low market potential. The Committee considered the possibility that the MHTGR might be selected as the new tritium production reactor for defense purposes and noted the vendor association's estimated reduction in development costs for a commercial version of the MHTGR. However, the Committee concluded, for the reasons summarized above, that the commercial MHTGR should be given low priority for federal funding.

LMR technology also provides enhanced safety features, but its uniqueness lies in the potential for extending fuel resources through breeding. While the market potential is low in the near term (before the second quarter of the next century), it could be an important long-term technology, especially if it can be demonstrated to be economic. The Committee believes that the LMR should have the highest priority for long-term nuclear technology development.

The problems of proliferation and physical security posed by the various technologies are different and require continued attention. Special attention will need to be paid to the LMR.

Alternative Research and Development Programs

The Committee developed three alternative R&D programs, each of which contains three common research elements: (1) reactor research using federal facilities. The experimental breeder reactor-II, hot fuel examination facility/south, and fuel manufacturing facility are retained for the LMR; (2) university research programs; and (3) improved performance and life extension programs for existing U.S. nuclear power plants.

The Committee concluded that federal support for development of a commercial version of the MHTGR should be a low priority. However, the fundamental design strategy of the MHTGR is based upon the integrity of the fuel (=1600°C) under operation and accident conditions. There are other potentially significant uses for such fuel, in particular, space propulsion. Consequently, the Committee believes that DOE should consider maintaining a coated fuel particle research program within that part of DOE focused on space reactors.

Alternative 1 adds funding to assist development of the mid-sized LWRs with passive safety features. Alternative 2 adds a LMR development program and associated facilities--the transient reactor test facility, the zero power physics reactor, the Energy Technology Engineering Center, and either the hot fuel examination facility/north in Idaho or the Hanford hot fuel examination facility. This alternative would also include limited research to examine the feasibility of recycling actinides from LWR spent fuel, utilizing the LMR. Finally, Alternative 3 adds the fast flux test facility and increases LMR funding to accelerate reactor and integral fast reactor fuel cycle development and examination of actinide recycle of LWR spent fuel.

None of the three alternatives contain funding for development of the MHTGR, SIR, PIUS, or CANDU-3.

Significant analysis and research is required to assess both the technical and economic feasibility of recycling actinides from LWR spent fuel. The Committee notes that a study of separations technology and transmutation systems was initiated in 1991 by DOE through the National Research Council's Board on Radioactive Waste Management.

It is the Committee's judgment that Alternative 2 should be followed because it:

provides adequate support for the most promising near-term reactor technologies;

provides sufficient support for LMR development to maintain the technical capabilities of the LMR R&D community;

would support deployment of LMRs to breed fuel by the second quarter of the next century should that be needed; and

would maintain a research program in support of both existing and advanced reactors.

The construction of nuclear power plants in the United States is stopping, as regulators, reactor manufacturers, and operators sort out a host of technical and institutional problems.

This volume summarizes the status of nuclear power, analyzes the obstacles to resumption of construction of nuclear plants, and describes and evaluates the technological alternatives for safer, more economical reactors. Topics covered include:

• Institutional issues—including regulatory practices at the federal and state levels, the growing trends toward greater competition in the generation of electricity, and nuclear and nonnuclear generation options.
• Critical evaluation of advanced reactors—covering attributes such as cost, construction time, safety, development status, and fuel cycles.

Finally, three alternative federal research and development programs are presented.

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Why Nuclear Energy Is Not Good? Essay

Introduction, why nuclear energy is not best alternative.

Energy source that is being proposed and used by people in the public, one must always look at safety and economic use. This paper provide thesis argument: nuclear energy is not good.

Making nuclear plant that would be good for replacing fossil fuels must require many nuclear plants which each need billion dollars. In the end this means the country would have to waste with so much money before it can remove the energy demand for the United States even as much as the fossil fuels (Mackenzie, 1977). Even the day and time needed to create a nuclear plant would be bog problem because one plant take about ten years in order to complete.

Again even shutting a nuclear plant involves massive expensive because it must be decommissioned by a decommissioning authority. Even those who say net production is cost effective for unit of nuclear energy produced may not be saying the truth because most of these estimate forget that nuclear energy is recipient of many government subsidies.

Most researches in renewable energy are done with help of government inventions and subsidies in it. If these are removed because they cannot be there in the future then cost of producing this power would be so high. Therefore, it would not be good idea to make large scale nuclear energy because it would be good to improve current energy sources in because of costs.

Another problem and issue is environmental damage being taken by this source of electricity. Nuclear energy is bad for total of nuclear waste removed at time of production and this waste often radioactive (Diesendorf, 2007). It is because of these problem, factories must have system in place that allow disposals and this must be very expensive that make a number of them very much uneconomical.

If they have not been in position to do so then the environment suffer through the emission of any kind of heat in waste or because radioactive emissions that be very harmful to the human body. Furthermore, even process of mining the material to begin with for nuclear energy production i.e. uranium mining would being radioactive dumps which being in some sort of negative cycles. One method used to remove of this kind of waste has been making of electricity during the use of heat from the waste.

Here, people who support of nuclear energy say that natural gas can be generated through such method and this may therefore increase the convenience of the waste. But, major reason for take up nuclear energy is to protect the environment from carbon emissions. It would not be good to use clean energy to make dirty one (Lowe & Brook, 2010). Another method in getting rid these effects is US must build repository.

Still, do not forget radioactive nature of the materials, there must be radioactive resistant material that you use so to prevent the spread of these radiations to outside world. Also, nuclear energy building factories are using too much of resource – they want too much of water in order to make cooling effect.

Some plants like this one in Southern Australia consumers thirty million liters of water and plans in future for tripling this water. When economic activity bring to much of using of important natural resource like the water then it is environmental sustainability should always be wrong since it now competing with other kinds of uses that may be more important to the people (Bodansky, 2008).

Last one; many nuclear firm will like to focus on high level of the waste like the one radioactive material from factory after completing the process but very small number of them will think on low level wastes like radiation clothing (that may been used so that it can cover workers not to get radioactive emissions), rags, syringes and other smaller produces of radioactive emissions that may not attract many attention from manufacturers but this still be a dangerous thing to the public.

One other issue concerning nuclear energy is likely harm is may present to the public. Any employee who works at nuclear plant is risky always of being exposed to low level of radiations that may be responsible for many sick persons. Still, some disastrous events even occur especially around this form of energy.

The most big case of them was the Chernobyl accident. Not just this, smaller accidents have occurred or will be going to occur in the everyday to day making nuclear energy. For example, in Minnesota, it was said contaminated equipment transported from another location, this could put many at big danger (Cooke, 2009). And this is not enough, any people who live near nuclear plants always put the other at problem of long term health effects.

Those who work or live near the factories may be in danger to long term complications like cancer. Even though the chance of having affects by these issues may be highly small when safety measures and throwing away are obeyed, studies show serious problem there is still a danger of getting a health problem because of going near radioactive emissions or radioactive work.

These many risk of nuclear energy i.e. safety problem and around health of workers and residents, the building factories is not and environmental problems are many. Make this nuclear energy not a good and clean energy for the United States and world.

Mackenzie, J. (1977). The nuclear power controversy. Biology quarterly review, 52(4), 467

Cooke, S. (2009). A cautionary history on nuclear age. NY: Black inc

Diesendorf, M. (2007). Greenhouse solutions and sustainable energy. NSW: New South Wales university press

Lowe, I. & Brook, B. (2010). Why vs. Why: Nuclear power. Sydney: Pantera Press

Bodansky, D. (2008). Environmental paradox of nuclear power. Environmental practice, 3(2), 86

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, February 29). Why Nuclear Energy Is Not Good? https://ivypanda.com/essays/renewable-energy/

"Why Nuclear Energy Is Not Good?" IvyPanda , 29 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/renewable-energy/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Why Nuclear Energy Is Not Good'. 29 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Why Nuclear Energy Is Not Good?" February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/renewable-energy/.

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• Radioactive Medical Waste Management
• Characteristics of Radioactive Emission
• Nuclear Energy and Its Risks
• Biological Effect of Man-Made Disasters in Nuclear Power Plants
• Aspects of Bremsstrahlung of Electrons in a Medium
• Gamma Ray Spectroscopy Analysis of Environmental Samples: a Literature Review
• The Effect of Nuclear Energy on the Environment
• Radioactive Decay Types:  Environments
• Impact of Nuclear Energy in France
• Theoretical Aspects of Quantum Teleportation
• The Wonders of the Universe
• The Evolution of Electricity
• Ethnography Reflection
• Foundations of Earth Science

Friday essay: Project 2025, the policy substance behind Trump’s showmanship, reveals a radical plan to reshape the world

Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University

Disclosure statement

Emma Shortis is Senior Researcher in International and Security Affairs at The Australia Institute, an independent think tank.

RMIT University provides funding as a strategic partner of The Conversation AU.

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In April 2022, conservative American think tank the Heritage Foundation, working with a broad coalition of 50 conservative organisations, launched Project 2025 : a plan for the next conservative president of the United States.

The Project’s flagship publication, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise , outlines in plain language and in granular detail, over 900-plus pages, what a second Trump administration (if it occurs) might look like. I’ve read it all, so you don’t have to.

The Mandate’s veneer of exhausting technocratic detail, focused mostly on the federal bureaucracy, sits easily alongside a Trumpian project of revenge and retribution . It is the substance behind the showmanship of the Trump rallies.

Developing transition plans for a presidential candidate is normal practice in the US. What is not normal about Project 2025, with its intertwined domestic and international agenda, are the plans themselves. Those for climate and the global environment, defence and security, the global economic system and the institutions of American democracy more broadly aim for nothing less than the total dismantling and restructure of both American life and the world as we know it.

The unapologetic agenda, according to Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts, is to “defeat the anti-American left – at home and abroad.”

Recommendations include completely abolishing the US Federal Reserve in favour of a system of “free banking”, the total reversal of all the Biden administration’s climate policies, a dramatic increase in fossil fuel extraction and use, ending economic engagement with China, expanding the nuclear arsenal and a “comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of U.S. participation in all international organizations” including the UN and its agencies. And that’s not all.

Australia itself is mentioned just seven times in the substantive text, with vague recommendations that a future administration support “greater spending and collaboration” with regional partners in defence and send a political appointee here as ambassador. But even if only partially implemented, the document’s overarching recommendations would have significant implications for Australia and our region.

Project 2025 is modelled on what the Foundation sees as its greatest historical triumph. The launch of the first Mandate for Leadership coincided with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981. By the following year, according to the Foundation, “more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy”.

Four decades later, Project 2025 is trying to repeat history.

The Project is not directly aligned with the Trump campaign: it has in fact attracted some ire from the campaign for presuming too much. Trump is under no obligation to adopt any of its plans should he return to the White House. But the sheer number of former Trump officials and loyalists involved in the Project, and its particular commitment to supporting a Trump return, suggest we should take its plans very seriously.

Much of what is happening now in the US is unprecedented. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, is currently locked in a Manhattan courtroom defending himself from criminal charges . Despite this unedifying spectacle, current polling separates Biden and Trump by a gap of just 2% , according to the latest poll. This year will be an existential test for American democracy.

Read more: Is America enduring a 'slow civil war'? Jeff Sharlet visits Trump rallies, a celebrity megachurch and the manosphere to find out

The four pillars

Project 2025’s chosen method for engineering its radical reshaping of that democracy takes a startlingly familiar bureaucratic approach. It aims to create a system where any potential chaos is contained by an administration and bureaucracy united by the same conservative vision. The vision rests on four “pillars”.

Pillar one is the 920-page Mandate – the manifesto for the next conservative president (and the major focus of this analysis).

Pillar two is the foundation’s recruitment program: a kind of conservative LinkedIn that aims to build a database of vetted, loyal conservatives ready to serve in the next administration.

The program is specifically designed to “deconstruct the Administrative State”: code for using Schedule F , a Trump-era executive order (since overturned), that would allow an administration to unilaterally re-categorise, fire and replace tens of thousands of independent federal employees with political loyalists.

Pillar three, the “Presidential Administration Academy”, will train those new recruits and existing amenable officials in the nature and use of power within the American political system, so they can effectively and efficiently implement the president’s agenda.

Pillar four consists of a secret “ Playbook ” – a resources bank of things like draft executive orders and specific transition plans ready for the first 180 days of a new administration.

The four pillars inform each other. The Mandate, for example, doubles as a recruitment tool that educates aspiring officials in the complex structures of the US federal government.

A response to Trump’s failures

The Mandate doesn’t specify who the next conservative president might be, but it is clearly written with Trump in mind. As it outlines, “one set of eyes reading these passages will be those of the 47th President of the United States”. What the Mandate can’t acknowledge is that the man aiming to be the 47th president was notorious for not reading his briefs when he occupied the Oval Office.

An unspoken aim of Project 2025 is to inject some ideological coherence into Trumpism. It aims to focus if not the leader, then the movement behind him – something that did not happen in the four years between January 2017 and January 2021. The entire project is a response to the perceived failures and weaknesses of the Trump administration.

Project 2025’s vision rests on almost completely gutting and replacing the bureaucracy that (in the view of its authors) thwarted and undermined the Trump presidency. It aims to remodel and reorganise the “ blob ” of powerful people who cycle through the landscape of American power between think tanks, government and higher education institutions.

It explicitly welcomes conservatives to this “mission” of assembling “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State”. “Conservatives”, in this framing, are not those who would defend and protect the institutions and traditions of the state, but rather right-wing radicals who would fundamentally change them.

The choice of language – “mission”, “army” – is also deliberate. The Mandate repeatedly distinguished between “ real people ” and what it sees as existential enemies. “America is now divided,” it argues, “between two opposing forces”. Those forces are irreconcilable, and because that fight extends abroad, “there is no margin for error”.

This framing of an America and a world engaged in an existential battle is underpinned by granular, bureaucratic detail – right down to recommendations for low-level appointments, budget allocations and regulatory reform. Effective understanding – and use of – the machinery of American power is, the Heritage Foundation believes, essential to victory.

That is why the Mandate is 920 pages from cover to cover, why it has 30 chapters written by “hundreds of contributors” with input from “more than 400 scholars and policy experts” and why it can now claim the support of 100 organisations .

What follows is a broad analysis of the implications of Project 2025 for the world outside the United States.

Drill baby, drill: climate and the environment

In late 2023, Donald Trump was asked by Fox News anchor Sean Hannity if he would be a “dictator”. Trump responded he would not, “ except on day one ”. In the flurry of coverage that followed, rightly condemning and outlining Trump’s repeated threats to American democracy , the aspiring president’s stated reasons for a day of dictatorship were overshadowed.

But Trump was explicit: “We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling.” While Trump himself may not be across or even aligned with the specific detail of much of Project 2025’s aims, on “drilling, drilling, drilling,” they are very much in sync.

The Mandate condemns what it describes as a “radical climate agenda” and “Biden’s war on fossil fuels”, recommending an immediate rollback of all Biden administration programs and reinstatement of Trump-era policies.

One of Biden’s signature legislative achievements, the Inflation Reduction Act , attracts a great deal of attention. Unsurprisingly, the broad recommendation is that the Act be repealed in its entirety. But the recommendations are also specific: repeal “credits and tax breaks for green energy companies”, stop “programs providing grants for environmental science activities” and ensure “the rescinding of all funds not already spent by these programs”. This would include removing “federal mandates and subsidies of electric vehicles”.

There is, in all, a great deal to “eliminate” – a word that appears in the Mandate over 250 times. In environmental policy, programs on the elimination list include the Clean Energy Corps , energy efficiency standards for appliances , the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations in the Department of Energy, and the entire National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration .

But this is not all. The elimination of climate-focused programs, legislation, offices and policies would be accompanied by a dramatic increase in fossil fuel extraction and use – a reversal of Biden’s “war”.

The chapter on the Department of the Interior, which manages federal lands and natural resources, recommends it “conduct offshore oil and natural gas lease sales to the maximum extent permitted” and restart the coal-leasing program.

This should include returning to the first Trump administration’s plans to further open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil fields development. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should, likewise, “not use environmental issues like climate change as a reason to stop LNG projects”.

Given the size and influence of the US economy, these policies would inevitably have global implications. This is not lost on the Mandate’s authors: the fight against the “radical climate agenda” is both local and global.

The chapter on Treasury, for example, recommends that a conservative administration “withdraw from climate change agreements that are inimical to the prosperity of the United States”. This includes, specifically, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement (which Trump withdrew the United States from in 2020, and Biden rejoined in 2021).

Analysis by the Guardian argues that taken together, these plans for rewinding climate action and accelerating fossil fuel extraction and use would be “even more extreme for the environment” than those of the first Trump administration.

This would not be a straightforward case of the US reverting from being a “good” actor on climate to a “bad” one. While the Biden administration has presided over some of the most significant climate legislation and actions in US history, domestic oil production has also hit a record high under Biden’s leadership . The US is already the second highest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

Several nations, including Australia, might find it convenient to hide behind the much more explicitly destructive policies of a future conservative US administration.

According to modelling by UK-based Carbon Brief , which does not include the increases in fossil fuel extraction and use outlined by the Mandate, a second Trump administration could result in an increase in emissions “equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries”.

That would mean, even without accounting for the opening of new oil reserves in places like Alaska, “a second Trump term […] would likely end any global hopes of keeping global warming below 1.5C”.

Project 2025’s authors are, of course, unapologetic. The Mandate demands that the next conservative administration “go on offense” and assert “America’s energy interests […] around the world” – to the point of establishing “full-spectrum strategic energy dominance”, in order to restore the nation’s global primacy.

A world on fire: security and defence

Restoring that global primacy is the focus of Section 2 of the Mandate. This section argues the Departments of Defense and State are “first among equals” with the executive branch, suggesting international relations should be a major focus for the next conservative presidency. It argues the success of such an administration “will be determined in part by whether [Defence and State] can be significantly improved in short order”.

Why is that improvement so important? Because, according to the Mandate, the US is engaged in an existential battle with its enemies, in “a world on fire”. China is, unsurprisingly, the main game: “America’s most dangerous international enemy”.

The Mandate’s overwhelming focus on China and its assessment that the world is in an era of “great power competition” is not radically different from the position of the current administration – nor the rest of the Western world. But the Mandate’s suggested response is different.

“The next conservative President,” the Mandate claims, “has the opportunity to restructure the making and execution of U.S. defense and foreign policy and reset the nation’s role in the world.”

For Defense, this reset means restoring “ warfighting as its sole mission” and making its highest priority “defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party”. It means dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and bringing its remit under Defense. It then recommends the department help with “aggressively building the border wall system on America’s southern border” and deploy “military personnel and hardware to prevent illegal crossings”.

Along with this expanded, more aggressive role for the Pentagon, the Mandate advocates for a dramatic expansion in defence personnel. A reduced force in Europe would be combined with an increase in “the Army force structure by 50,000 to handle two major regional contingencies simultaneously”.

It’s not quite clear how recruitment would be boosted so quickly. But at one point, the Mandate recommends requiring completion of the military entrance examination “by all students in schools that receive federal funding”. This is one of many lines that hints at a radical reshaping of American life.

The “two major contingencies” the department must prepare for appear to be “threats” from both China and Russia. As the long fight over US funding for Ukraine has demonstrated, however, many Trump-aligned conservatives have an ideological affinity with Putin’s Russia. This radical turnaround in the recent history of US–Russia relations marks a clear tension in conservative politics.

The Mandate acknowledges Russia now “starkly divides conservatives”. But it offers no real resolution, suggesting this would be left up to the president. Inevitable contradictions like this run throughout.

Even on China – one of very few issues that unites conservatives and liberals – the Mandate can contradict itself. One chapter, for example, worries about China blocking market access for the United States. Another advocates complete market decoupling.

Modernise, adapt, expand: on the nuclear arsenal

Trump has repeatedly toyed with the possibility of using nuclear weapons. In 2016, the then-candidate was pressed on why he wouldn’t rule out using them. He responded with his own question: “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?”

As president, Trump repeatedly bragged about the US nuclear arsenal and weapons development, and allegedly illegally removed classified documents concerning nuclear capabilities from the White House. During his presidency, the US also dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb, nicknamed with characteristic misogyny the “ mother of all bombs ”, on Afghanistan.

The Mandate encourages more weapons development. It argues the Department of Energy should refocus on “developing new nuclear weapons and naval nuclear reactors”. Its recommendation that the United States “expand” its nuclear arsenal in order to “deter Russia and China simultaneously” will especially concern advocates of non-proliferation .

The Mandate also recommends the next administration “end ineffective and counterproductive nonproliferation activities like those involving Iran and the United Nations”.

“Friends and adversaries” abroad

This ramping up of American militarism should be accompanied, according to the Mandate, by a radical shakeup of American diplomacy. The next administration should

significantly reorient the U.S. government’s posture toward friends and adversaries alike – which will include much more honest assessments about who are friends and who are not. This reorientation could represent the most significant shift in core foreign policy principles and corresponding action since the end of the Cold War.

In a line that inevitably provokes thoughts of regime change , the Mandate suggests “the time may be right to press harder on the Iranian theocracy […] and take other steps to draw Iran into the community of free and modern nations”. It is, of course, silent on how disastrous regime change has proved to be in the conduct of US foreign policy over the past half century.

The Mandate also suggests a return to the Trump administration’s “tough love” approach to US participation in international organisations, ensuring no foreign aid supports reproductive rights or care, and that USAID , the nation’s major aid agency, “rescind all climate policies”.

All of this would mean installing “political ambassadors with strong personal relationships with the President”, especially in “key strategic posts such as Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)”. In the State Department specifically, “No one in a leadership position on the morning of January 20 should hold that position at the end of the day.”

Perhaps most significantly, Roberts argues in the Mandate’s foreword that “Economic engagement with China should be ended, not rethought.” The chapter on the Department of Commerce similarly argues for “strategic decoupling from China”.

Given the size and scope of the American and Chinese economies, and smaller nations like Australia’s reliance on stable economic relations with both, such a “decoupling” from China, alongside a ramping up of militarism, would have significant, wide-ranging consequences.

Another recommendation is that the United States “withdraw” from both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and “terminate its financial contribution to both institutions”. The global consequences of even more radical suggestions like a return to the gold standard, or even “abolishing the federal role in money altogether” in favour of a system of “free banking”, are genuinely mind-boggling.

A new, frightening world in the making?

Project 2025 opens a window onto the modern American conservative movement, documenting in minute detail just how much it has reoriented itself around Trump and the ideological incoherence of Trumpism more broadly. The success, or not, of this effort to unify the movement will also have international implications, as those same organisations and individuals cultivate their connections with the far-right globally.

While Trump, as always, is difficult to predict, there are long and deep links between his campaign and supporters and the Project’s supporters and contributors. Nothing is inevitable, but should Trump return to the White House, it is highly likely at least some of Project 2025’s recommendations, policies, authors, and aspiring officials will join him there. These include people like Peter Navarro, a former Trump official, loyalist and Mandate author, who is currently serving a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress because he refused to comply with a congressional subpoena during the January 6 investigation.

Project 2025’s Mandate is iconoclastic and dystopian, offering a dark vision of a highly militaristic and unapologetically aggressive America ascendant in “a world on fire”. Those who wish to understand Trump and the movement behind him, and the active threat they pose to American democracy, are obliged to take it seriously.

• US politics
• Ronald Reagan
• Donald Trump
• Friday essay
• Trump administration
• Australia US alliance
• Climate change aid
• President Joe Biden

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