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This article is from Dollars & Sense: Real World Economics, available at http://www.dollarsandsense.org
This article is from the
March/April 2022 issue.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is—as of this writing, in late March—an ongoing calamity. It is not possible to predict how the invasion will end or what its consequences will be. As of now, it is known that many thousands of people are already dead and that millions more are being lost.
In addition to these most brutal consequences, the war must force us to rethink many issues that—with no exaggeration—reach to the core of how we can envision future prospects for life on earth. I will only address one of these questions now. I will only address one question: What role should nuclear power play in the advancement of a viable global climate stabilization project.
The Russian military took control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, located 60 miles north-east of Kyiv in Ukraine, during the initial phase. Chernobyl was the scene of the worst nuclear power station accident in history, back when Ukraine was still part the Soviet Union. An explosion blew the lid off one of the plant’s four operating nuclear reactors. Radioactive materials were released into surrounding airways, which spread throughout the region. Despite the disaster, Chernobyl’s other reactors continued to operate until 2000.
The three remaining reactors were shut down in 2000. More than 20,000 spent fuelrods are still stored at the site. These rods need to be kept cool, and the cooling system must operate on electricity. If the system’s electrical power source were to malfunction, the spent fuel rods could become exposed to the air and catch fire. This would result in radioactive materials being released into the atmosphere. Radioactive materials can be released again and spread throughout the region and further afield, just as they did in 1986. This scenario is low-probability, but not impossible.
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant, Europe’s biggest, was also under Russian control on March 3. According to a March 4 report on NPR, “Russian forces repeatedly fired heavy weapons in the direction of the plant’s massive reactor buildings, which housed dangerous nuclear fuel.” All military actions at or near the plant create further danger of the plant’s operations becoming compromised. This could, like Chernobyl’s, lead to radioactive material being released into the atmosphere.
There are currently active threats to nuclear disasters at Zaporizhzhia as well as Chernobyl. Additionally, the war is putting at risk the security systems used to protect both sites. Both sites have become combat areas, making them more susceptible to attacks from terrorist organizations and non-state actors. These organizations would most likely seek to gain access to materials that could allow them to make nuclear weapons. They would be able to at least threaten radioactive material release.
Argument for Nuclear Power
In short, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dramatized and intensified the dangers associated with operating nuclear power plants. These dangers are not new. Despite these ongoing, real and unavoidable dangers, nuclear power still has strong supporters. These supporters include those within the industry, such as shareholders and CEOs at nuclear power companies, along with nuclear engineers, consultants and employees operating the reactors. These people have a lot of money and careers at risk. But nuclear supporters also include many reputable people—a significant number of progressive commentators among them—who have nothing to personally gain from the nuclear industry.
These nuclear supporters rely on two points to support their advocacy. The first is inarguable: that we—the entire global community—have no choice but to truly take dramatic action now to combat climate change. It follows that we have to stop burning fossil fuels—oil, coal, and natural gas—to produce energy. This is because the burning of fossil fuels to produce energy produces carbon dioxide (CO2), which in turn causes climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has now concluded repeatedly that to have any serious chance of moving onto a climate stabilization path, the world must cut CO2 emissions by roughly half as of 2030—less than eight years from now—and be carbon neutral by 2050. To help achieve these goals, nuclear power has the important advantage of producing abundant electricity without generating any CO2 emissions or air pollution.
The second argument that nuclear proponents make is that expanding nuclear energy makes sense because of the major problems with renewable energy as an alternative source of non-CO2-generating electric power. In their view, renewable energy sources—starting with solar and wind power—will never be able, on their own, to establish an alternative energy infrastructure on a global basis that can reliably deliver an adequate supply of energy to compensate for the phasing out of fossil fuels.
James Hansen, formerly of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is the most well-respected advocate for these positions. For decades, Hansen has been the world’s best-known climate scientist fighting for decisive action on climate change. Hansen was joined by Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel and Tom Wigley in 2015 to write:
The climate system cares about greenhouse gas emissions—not about whether energy comes from renewable power or abundant nuclear power. Some people argue that it is possible to meet all of our energy requirements with renewables. The 100% renewable scenario ignores or minimizes the intermittency issue. This is because it makes unrealistic technical assumptions. … Large amounts of nuclear power make it much easier for solar and wind to close the energy gap.
Hansen and his coauthors advocated building 115 new nuclear reactors each year until 2050. This would mean that there would be more than 4,000 reactors operating worldwide by 2050. This is nearly ten times the number of reactors currently operating worldwide.
Hansen’s perspective was strongly endorsed in the 2019 edition of the World Energy OutlookThe International Energy Agency publishes the most well-respected source on global energy issues. The 2019 Outlook concludes that “Alongside renewable energy and [carbon capture] technologies, nuclear power will be needed for clean energy transitions around the world.” Similar views have been advanced most recently by progressive commentators such as Bhaskar Sunkara and Liza Featherstone, with Featherstone writing in Jacobin last September that “given the magnitude of the threat from carbon, the left must be willing to give serious consideration to a role for nuclear power as a way out of the climate apocalypse.”
Why Nuclear Supporters Are Wrong
To be fair, the articles by Hansen, Sunkara, and Featherstone were all published prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, their support for nuclear power is consistent with a long-standing trend of downplaying the many fundamental problems that would unavoidably be attached to large-scale global nuclear reactor build-ups. In fact, the widespread view was that nuclear power’s risks were manageable and small after the 1986 Chernobyl accident. The March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant resulted in a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami. This view was reaffirmed. Although the full extent of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown is still unknown, the latest estimate of the costs of decommissioning and providing compensation to victims for the Fukushima disaster is $250 billion.
Fukushima’s safety regulations were clearly a failure. This happened in Japan, a country with a high income and has suffered the most from the effects nuclear power. If the Japanese nuclear safety regulations were a failure, then why should we expect stronger and more effective regulations to be enforced around the world in the face of a massive buildup of nuclear reactors such as Hansen’s 4,000-reactor global nuclear reactor build-out? This massive build-out would likely include countries with lower regulatory standards and tighter public safety budgets that Japan.
This raises the question of costs. According to the U.S. Energy Department the cost of producing a kilowatt-hour of electricity from nuclear energy is more than twice that of solar panels or onshore winds. In addition, the cost of renewables, especially solar energy, has been falling rapidly over the past decade. There are also significant cost reductions that are possible. By contrast, nuclear energy is on a “negative learning curve”—i.e., the costs of nuclear energy have been rising over time, in large part, though not entirely, due to the increased understanding that truly minimizing the risks of another Fukushima-like disaster entails billions of dollars in additional costs to bring a single new reactor online. The bankruptcy filings of Westinghouse, a multinational corporation that had been a global leader in the construction of nuclear plants for decades, were a result.
Even the International Energy Agency couldn’t make a strong case for nuclear in its 2019 World Energy Outlook. It estimated that, if the advanced economies were to forego nuclear energy altogether as a component of their clean energy transitions, concentrating instead on renewables, the result would be “5% higher electricity bills for consumers in advanced economies.” As a worst-case scenario, something like a 5% increase in electricity prices is clearly a trivial amount to pay to avoid all the fully understood costs and dangers that are unavoidably tied to nuclear energy.
The High-Efficiency and Renewables Options Work
It is not easy to create a global renewable-dominant power system. These challenges are not insurmountable. This is because advancing a global clean electricity infrastructure involves two main features. Investments to significantly increase energy efficiency standards are equally important as expanding the supply from renewable energy sources. Building a high-efficiency system of energy means, among others, upgrading the heating, lighting and cooling systems in buildings, expanding public transportation and making private vehicles more efficient. Even with high efficiency standards, it is still necessary to use energy to lighten, heat and cool buildings, to power cars, buses and trains, and to operate computers, industrial machinery, and other purposes. The challenges of building a renewable energy-dominant infrastructure will be reduced by high efficiency, but not eliminated.
As we saw above, Hansen and other proponents of nuclear power cite the issue of intermittency with solar and wind power—that the sun isn’t always shining and the wind isn’t always blowing at any given location. This problem can easily be solved by continuing to improve electricity transmission and battery storage. It is also the case that other renewable sources—geothermal, hydro, and low-emissions bioenergy—are not intermittent. They can be used as supplementary energy sources in combined renewable power systems.
Another challenge is to develop renewable energy projects that minimize land use impacts that could disrupt natural habitats and communities. These concerns should be addressed with great care. As a general rule, it is helpful to look at Mara Prentiss’ calculations from Harvard University. She found that solar panels could be placed on rooftops and in parking lots across the country, providing more than half the required surface area. Solar energy sources using existing technologies could supply 100% U.S. energy demand and consume 0.1% to 0.2% more land than rooftops and parking lots.
The question of whether there will be enough supplies of the complete set of raw materials needed to rapidly expand renewable energy is another. The short answer is “yes.” It is likely that some short-term bottlenecks will emerge with some of the required materials, in particular the chemical element tellurium, which is used to produce solar cells. However, tellurium shortages should not be a problem. One solution is to increase the industry for recycling metals and other minerals. The average recycling rate for these resources is below 1%. However, the U.S. has a 71% recycling rate for steel containers. To solve the problem of shortages in renewable energy equipment, we need to raise recycling rates for minerals to just 5%. There will be opportunities to reduce the amount of minerals and metals required to produce solar panels and wind turbines. This is in addition to recycling. As technology improves, so will the opportunities for economizing. Substitute materials are also possible for materials that are in short supply.
There may be a case to allow the current nuclear power plants that are in good condition to continue their normal service life while we work towards a global clean energy transition. However, it is not possible to continue operating these plants for the next 20 years without expanding new reactors. We know that a high-efficiency, renewables-dominant energy infrastructure will deliver a zero-emission global economy in 30 years.
Seth Borenstein, “Explainer: What’s behind latest scare at Chernobyl Plant?” ABC News, March 9, 2022 (abcnews.go.com); Geoff Brumfiel, “What we know about Russia’s capture of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power complex,” NPR, March 4, 2022 (npr.org); Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier, “Terrorist Nuclear Weapon Construction: How Difficult?” Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 2006 (jstor.org); James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira, and Tom Wigley, ”Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change,” The GuardianDecember 3, 2015 (theguardian.com); International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2019,, November 2019 (iea.org); Bhaskar Sunkara, “If we want to fight the climate crisis, we must embrace nuclear power,” The Guardian, June 21, 2021 (theguardian.com); Liza Featherstone, “Illinois Just Won a Big Green Jobs Victory,” Jacobin, September 21, 2021 (jacobinmag.com); Rachel Mealey, “TEPCO: Fukushima nuclear clean-up, compensation costs nearly double previous estimate at $250 billion,” ABC Australia, December 16, 2016 (abc.net.au); World Health Organization, “Radiation: Health consequences of the Fukushima nuclear accident,” March 10, 2016 (who.int); U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Levelized Costs of New Generation Resources,” Annual Energy Outlook 2021, February 2021 (eia.gov); Alicia Valero et al., “Material bottlenecks in the future development of green technologies,” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, October 2018 (sciencedirect.com); “Ferrous Metals: Material-Specific Data,” Environmental Protection Agency, accessed March 23, 2022 (epa.gov); Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin, Climate Crisis and The Global Green New Deal (Verso, 2020).
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