Nuclear power is often hailed as a magic bullet solution for the rapid and large-scale decarbonisation of our societies which we all know needs to happen if we have any hope of mitigating the worst effects of the unfolding climate emergency. Among politicians and industry groups, it is consistently favoured over meaningful investment in renewable energy systems, bolstered with misleading claims of its safety, efficiency, stability, and speed of deployment.
With the costs and efficiency of renewable energy solutions improving year on year, and the effects of our rapidly changing climate accelerating across the globe, we need to take an honest look at some of the myths being perpetuated by the nuclear industry and its supporters. Here are six reasons why nuclear power is not the way to a green and peaceful zero carbon future.
1. Nuclear energy delivers too little to matter
In order to tackle climate change, we need to reduce fossil fuels in the total energy mix well before 2050 to 0%.
According to scenarios from the World Nuclear Association and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (both nuclear lobby organisations), doubling the capacity of nuclear power worldwide in 2050 would only decrease greenhouse gas emissions by around 4%. But in order to do that, the world would need to bring 37 new large nuclear reactors to the grid every year from now, year on year, until 2050.
The last decade only showed a few to 10 new grid connections per year. Ramping that up to 37 is physically impossible – there is not sufficient capacity to make large forgings like reactor vessels. There are currently only 57 new reactors under construction or planned for the coming one-and-a-half decade. Doubling nuclear capacity – different from the explosive growth of clean renewable energy sources like solar and wind – is therefore unrealistic. And that for only 4% when we already need to reduce 100%.
2. Nuclear power plants are dangerous and vulnerable
Nuclear factories and plants are easy targets for malevolent acts: terrorist threats, the risk of unintentional or voluntary airliner crashes, cyberattacks or acts of war. The enclosures of plants and certain ancillary buildings containing radioactive materials are not designed to withstand this type of attack or shock.
Nuclear power plants present unique hazards in terms of the potential consequences resulting from a severe accident. Nuclear reactors and their associated high level spent fuel stores are vulnerable to natural disasters, as Fukushima Daiichi showed, but they are also vulnerable in times of military conflict.
For the first time in history, a major war is being waged in a country with multiple nuclear reactors and thousands of tons of highly radioactive spent fuel. The war in southern Ukraine around Zaporizhzhia puts them all at heightened risk of a severe accident.
Nuclear power plants are some of the most complex and sensitive industrial installations, which require a very complex set of resources in ready state at all times to keep them operational. This cannot be guaranteed in a war.
This can’t be guaranteed in a time of climate crisis and extreme weather events either. Nuclear power is a water-hungry technology. Nuclear power plants consume a lot of water for cooling. They are vulnerable to water stress, the warming of rivers, and rising temperatures, which can weaken the cooling of power plants and equipment. Nuclear reactors in the United States and France are often shut down during heatwaves, or see their activity drastically slowed.
3. Nuclear energy is too expensive
To protect the climate, we must abate the most carbon at the least cost and in the least time.
The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt-hour (MWh), the World Nuclear Industry Status Report said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189 per MWh.
Over the past decade, the World Nuclear Industry Status Report estimates levelised costs – which compare the total lifetime cost of building and running a plant to lifetime output – for utility-scale solar have dropped by 88% and for wind by 69%. According to the same report, these costs have increased by 23% for nuclear.*
According to a November 2021 study released by Greenpeace France and the Rousseau Institute, power from the under-construction European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) at Flamanville in France would be 3 times as expensive as the country’s most competitive renewable sources.
4. Nuclear energy is too slow
Stabilising the climate is an emergency. Nuclear power is slow.
The 2021 World Nuclear Industry Status Report estimates that since 2009 the average construction time for reactors worldwide was just under 10 years, well above the estimate given by the World Nuclear Association (WNA) industry body of between 5 and 8.5 years.
The extra time that nuclear plants take to build has major implications for climate goals, as existing fossil-fueled plants continue to emit CO2 while awaiting substitution. The construction of a nuclear plant is a long and complex process that obviously releases CO2, as does the demolition of decommissioned nuclear sites.
Uranium extraction, transport and processing is obviously not free of greenhouse gas emissions either. All in all, nuclear power stations score comparable with wind and solar energy. But this latter can be implemented much faster and on a much bigger scale. We cannot wait for another decade for emissions to go down. They need to go down now. With clean renewable sources and energy efficiency, we can do that.
5. Nuclear energy generates huge amounts of toxic waste
The multiple stages of the nuclear fuel cycle produce large volumes of radioactive waste. No government has yet resolved how to safely manage this waste.
Some of this nuclear waste is highly radioactive and will remain so for several thousand years. Nuclear waste is a real scourge for our environment and for future generations, who will still have the responsibility of managing it in several centuries.
Countries like France are pushing hard for nuclear power at the EU level, hoping that when it comes to waste, out of sight is out of mind. But nuclear waste will never go away, and will never be sustainable.
This is one of the obvious reasons why nuclear power shouldn’t be eligible for green funding nor marketed as ‘sustainable’, as pointed out recently by countries like Austria, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, and Spain, who spoke against the inclusion of nuclear power in the EU’s green finance taxonomy. This is also one of the reasons why, on 9 March 2020, the EU Commission’s Technical Expert Group on Sustainable Finance (TEF) rejected nuclear energy because it did not meet the EU’s ‘Do No Significant Harm’ principle and recommended excluding nuclear power from the green taxonomy.
Nuclear waste management is costing taxpayers absurd amounts of money, costs for storage projects reaching into the billions. This is true both for Europe and North America. In 2019, a US Energy Department report showed the projected cost for long-term nuclear waste cleanup jumped more than $100 billion in just one year.
6. The nuclear industry is falling short of its promises
The EPR nuclear reactor technology has been showcased by the French government and French nuclear operator EDF as a revolutionary technology announcing the dawn of a nuclear renaissance. The reality is that this technology isn’t any kind of technological leap. More importantly, the French EPR reactor located in Flamanville is more than 10 years overdue and nearly four times over budget.
This so-called “next-generation nuclear reactor”, has also sustained multiple problems, delays and cost overruns in France, the United Kingdom, Finland and China.
Hypothetical new nuclear power technologies have been promised to be the next big thing for the last forty years, but in spite of massive public subsidies, that prospect has never panned out. That is also true for Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
And for nuclear fusion, an idea that is as old as the nuclear industry, which somehow always seems to be fifty years away. The cost and uncertainty of fusion mean investing in thermonuclear reactors at the expense of other available clean energy options. This technology won’t arrive in time, if ever, and the money would be better invested elsewhere.
Let’s exert the utmost caution when presented with pro-nuclear opinions coming from experts and organisations regularly working with stakeholders from the nuclear sector and potentially tainted by vested interests. Nuclear energy has no place in a safe, clean, sustainable future. It is more important than ever that we steer away from false solutions and leave nuclear power in the past.
Mehdi Leman is a content editor for Greenpeace International based in France
Discussion
If you believe that everyone has an equal right to energy and you also believe that fossil fuel use needs to be reduced then Stanford University provided the answer to power the world through wind, water and solar power.
The "Inconvenient Truth" was the Stanford paper was inequitable and did not account for an improvement in living standards and more access to electricity for non-OECD countries. The numbers don't add up, if we factor in greater access to energy for all - then nuclear is going to be an essential part of the mix in the coming century.
Food for thought, 6.5 million people die annually from air pollution - how are we going to help these people when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing? We need to look beyond a convenient for wealthy countries with amply electricity.
So are solar, wind and other junk actually renewable considering they need to be replaced every 5 years since they break these forms of energy have an appalling efficiency rate solar works less than 50% of the time since there's this thing called night and also clouds these methods aren't green since they harm the local habitats far more than nuclear and to get the same energy output as a nuclear power plant would take just as long to make and would be just as expensive not even accounting for the fact that solar, wind break so quickly also making these things are hardly green since they are made of non recyclable materials and limited resources trying to say that this is a solution is ridiculous: 1) Share it, 2) store it, 3) shift it. Share it: several countries built undersea cables called interconnectors allowing them to share renewable energy with other countries and there are plenty more on the way. - nuclear can do this as well so these other energy sources are pointless
Store it: new developments in battery storage mean renewable energy can be used even when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun shining. - batteries loose most of their storage capabilities within a few months. Other storage options suggested are supper expensive so even more cost to try to make these energy sources reliable
Shift it: Demand Side Response is already happening in many places (turn down or turn off non-essential processes at times of peak demand helping the grid to balance supply and demand without the need for additional generation (e.g. power stations) to be used). - not everything is even going to be able to work apparently if everyone converts since 'renewable' energy isn't going to be anywhere close to meeting energy demands
We need a safer, cheaper, and faster solution that won’t be a threat to us and the future generations to come. Renewable Energy sources (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, ocean, and biomass) are sustainable and nonpolluting which makes it ideal. - so renewable energy sources aren't going to be any faster or cheaper. we've had as long as it took France to go nuclear to make 'renewable energy sources' but no ones even close And how are they safer? they harm the climate far more in production and maintenance than nuclear. By the time enough is made, the carbon output required to make them is going to ruin the planet long before. Russian troops took over the Chernobyl Nuclear Power station, demonstrates the extreme dangers associated with the operation, control and maintenance of these power stations. - sorry what, you just took some completely unrelated thing and just tried to say that nuclear energy is bad. How does a dictator invading a country have anything to do with this? this whole renewable energy climate change thing is just a subtle way of turning everyone into a bunch of anarchist morons who care more about trying to gain power than the climate: I am ready to protest, to msrch, to add my voice against these most dangerous proposals. This is of utmost importance and poses a terrible danger to our country.
I believed as you do, that nuclear energy is irredeemably dangerous and dirty, when I was a volunteer in the little Greenpeace office in Eugene, Oregon 40 years ago, and as recently as perhaps five years back. But I try to maintain the scientific headspace, an open mind: I believe what I believe rather strongly, but if you bombard me with overwhelming evidence that doesn’t try to refute the laws of physics, you can change my mind.
I will still get in the way, physically, if I must, of anyone trying to build a new pressurized water nuke anywhere near my part of the world. The basic physics of PWRs makes them dangerous, and they create wastes that will be radioactive not for the 240,000 years you often read, but for tens of millions of years. But several new kinds of fourth generation reactors look much safer, and molten salt reactors in particular look walkaway-safe and virtually idiot-proof. And the right reactors can burn wastes instead of producing them.
A MSR cannot melt down: the fuel and coolant salts are already molten. They are just barely molten, at half their vaporization temperature, and the radionuclides are dissolved in, chemically bound to, the coolant salts, so very little radionasty could escape to atmosphere should they spill; MSRs produce small amounts of several radioactive gasses, but they are removed every time the coolant salts circulate, so the amount lost in a spill would be trivial. A spill freezes on contact with anything cooler; easy to clean up. They self-regulate: too hot, and the fuel salts expand, moving the reactants farther apart and slowing the reaction; cooling the salts brings the reactants closer together, bringing the reactor back up to its optimum temperature and output. Most designs can cool themselves by convection; their pumps are only needed to move the cooling salts to the heat exchangers. Some designs drain their coolant/fuel salts down, by gravity, into safe storage tanks that cannot sustain a reaction should the reactor somehow overheat. You could literally pull the plug and walk away.
MSRs operate at garden-hose pressures—no possibility of a steam explosion; and without zirconium-clad fuel rods or the possibility of steam in the reactor vessel, there’s no chemical reaction that can produce explosive hydrogen. Yet they run at supercritical temperatures, up to twice as hot as a PWR, and so more efficient, so you need less plant for the same output. That, passive safety and mass production will make them cost much less. Make them small enough to mass produce; get one design (at a time) approved by the obstructionist Nuclear Regulatory Commission, instead of letting them take years to approve each and every one-off plant; make that design on an assembly line, and truck/rail them to the site. Assemble a few components, fuel the reactor, and you’re producing power. And the right size reactor—or a few smaller ones—could replace the boiler in a coal-fired power plant, saving the rest of that expensive, high-embodied carbon infrastructure and bringing coal off-line that much faster.
MSRs should need much less cooling water than PWRs, and they can recycle it, which is good: salts are water soluble, so you’d want to keep MSRs away from rivers in case of any possible spill.
Meanwhile ThorCon is building a prototype “ThorCon Isle” molten salt reactor power plant on a barge in Indonesia; they think they can use the world’s excess shipbuilding capacity to build 100 complete power plants a year, to head off coal in the developing world, and they think they can produce power for 3.7 cents per kWh, competitive with coal. I’d rather they were using a more advanced reactor, a waste burner, than the original Oak Ridge National Laboratory MSRE design, but one thing at a time.
One of my objections to nuclear power was/is uranium mining and its attendant environmental destruction and pollution, often on native lands or lands that should be wilderness. Another objection was the wastes created, which would need safe storage far longer than Homo “sapiens” has been human. But fast (neutron) reactors should burn high-level wastes (the 96 percent of uranium fuel wasted in PWRs, and all of the transuranics created) and one developer, Elysium Industries, has a simple, inexpensive, two-stage chemical process to dissolve spent fuel (and depleted uranium, unprocessed U-238, plutonium, thorium and U-233, transuranic minor actinides—all of the radionasties we want to burn up) into coolant salts. Their Molten Chloride Salt Fast Reactor (which avoids nuclear weapons/NRC regulations concerns with lithium-based salts) should leave nothing but gasses that are radioactive for about ten years, then valuable and useful: and solid wastes reduced in volume about tenfold, that are radioactive for about 300 years, instead of millions. That seals the deal for me: reliable, carbon-free, safe baseload power that burns up our high level radioactive wastes instead of leaving them for the great, great … great great grandkids to deal with? Hellyeah.
You need some fissiles enriched to about 20 percent to fuel a “fast” reactor at start-up; downblended (bomb grade is 90 percent plus) U-235, U-233, and plutonium from disassembled nuclear weapons is perfect, so we need never dig up another Native American Reservation for uranium. We have 80,000 tons of high level wastes stockpiled in the U.S., 300,000 tons around the world. That’s enough (U.S. alone) for 533 reactors for 100 years at 1.5 tons consumed per reactor per year, enough to supplement renewables until fusion comes on line.
Despite your dismissal of fusion (and I don’t think much of the Tokamak) there are a couple of very promising “aneutronic”—none of the pesky high-speed neutrons that poison the deuterium-tritium reaction—designs being developed right now. And General Fusion is even now building a demonstration Magnetized Target “Gobsmacker” fusion reactor in England, and has contracted with H2 Green Steel to build a reactor to power the hydrogen-reduction carbon-free steel mill H2 is building in Sweden, along with the local district heating grid.
We should do all we can with with wind, solar, tidal (without messing up fish runs) and wave power, and especially geothermal; plasma drills being tested right now by MIT spinoff Quaise, and by PLASMABITS, promise to drill as deep as 20 kilometers, in as little as 100 days, to rock hot enough to run a geothermal power plant at supercritical temperatures, which will more than double geothermal’s efficiency. Biomass with carbon capture and storage done right could clean up the overgrowth in our forests before they immolate us, could replace some fossil fuels with carbon-neutral bio fuels and chemicals, and could leave us with lots of char to improve soils and sequester atmospheric carbon at the same time. But wind and solar by themselves would depend upon lots and lots of energy storage, and the batteries, mostly still lithium-ions, being used for this are expensive, are burning up a rare strategic material, and use conflict materials, particularly cobalt. Better batteries and other storage tech is here or near. But enough excess solar/wind capacity to generate a surplus to store, and in particular the technology to store enough for several days, is going to be expensive; I pay attention, and there are weeks on end, in the U.S. in winter, when there is very little sun and too much wind. I don’t believe that the amount of energy storage we’d need to run society on wind and solar is realistic.
American, Canadian, Swedish, Finnish, Austrian, and trans-European entities are all working to bring clean, carbon-neutral steel and aluminum on line this decade, 2026-ish, and together those industries are about 11 percent of climate change (steel alone is 9 percent), so that’s huge. They use electricity instead of coal, and the waste is either pure oxygen, or water. But they’re going to need lots of power, and the way to do this is to size a clean steel mill or a Tesla megafactory around a small modular molten salt reactor. That way, for one thing, they’re neither dependent nor a burden on the grid.
I would much rather humans had never learned to split atoms, but that evil Djinn is already out of the bottle. Your information is several years out of date: I urge you to take a fresh, deep, unbiased look at the state of the art in both fission and fusion. The right reactors and fuels relieve my concerns with nuclear power. I think they might yours, too.
Wow, incredibly insightful. As a high school student from Melbourne, I have to admit your insight is incredibly wonderful, and although I'm a nuclear fanatic, I do understand the flaws of nuclear entirely. Still, I believe like you that with enough advancements, we can absolutely maximise the potential of nuclear energy to minimise the wastage and nuclear toxicity.
You guys should bein the solar business!
Greta Thunberg has 6 nuclear reactors in her country and she is a member of Greenpeace. What a hypocrite. Why should we listen to you?
Please stop spreading incorrect news on nuclear. Clearly, there is a bias and lack of research.
Hello Karthik and thank you for your comment! This article is citing numerous sources. Feel free to do the same and suggest other sources, facts and figures you would to highlight. And let us know which specific part of this article you consider "incorrect news". Thank you.
Hi, just because you link to sources that say the things you copy and pasted into your article, you make distort the facts to fit your narrative. Your first point of there only being 10 new grid connections per year for the last 10 years ignores the bear market the uranium price was in after the Fukishima incident (which by the way, caused no deaths or health effects due to the meltdown), so no new mines were developed, and the existing uranium inventory in the world was drawn down to where we are today. Why would new nuclear reactors come online during this time? You say that ramping up to 37 reactors a year would be impossible, yet China is planning on building 150 new reactors over the next 15 years. If the rest of the world embraced nuclear in conjuction with renewables, hitting or exceeding 37 reactors a year is not unreasonable.
Also, not doing things because they take a while to accomplish is laughable. Just because it takes time to build new reactors doesn't mean we shouldn't do that, otherwise in 10 years we will be in the same place we currently are, just without an electricity generating source.
What are you qualifications for writing articles like this? Do you have any scientific background or schooling? This article reads like you Googled why nuclear is bad and copy and pasted the information from a 10 year old Greenpeace article.
Nowhere in this ridiculous list do you mention problems with the intermittency of renewables. Where do we turn to when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing? Battery storage does not have without its challenges in mining and waste as well.
Hello Nick and thank you for your comment.
A good mix of renewable energy can do the job, even when the wind isn't blowing. 1) Share it, 2) store it, 3) shift it.
Share it: several countries built undersea cables called interconnectors allowing them to share renewable energy with other countries and there are plenty more on the way.
Store it: new developments in battery storage mean renewable energy can be used even when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun shining. You are right about the social and environmental impact: the battery industry must deliver on the promises of the Global Battery Alliance to accelerate action towards a socially responsible and environmentally sustainable supply chain to power the energy revolution.
It's a good thing batteries are not the only way to store power, there are all sorts of other systems in the works (Compressed Air Energy Storage, Thermal Storage, Pumped Hydro Storage, Hydrogen Storage, etc).
Shift it: Demand Side Response is already happening in many places (turn down or turn off non-essential processes at times of peak demand helping the grid to balance supply and demand without the need for additional generation (e.g. power stations) to be used).
Please can you send to me a french version for Québec, Canada. Thank you so much for your such important mobilisation against consituing to developp and use nuclear energy. Oka, Québec, Canada.
Can we please knock off the moral Puritanism? Every scientific group of merit ranging from the IPCC to the Union of Concerned Scientists has acknowledged that a climate change solution without nuclear power is drastically more difficult. Nuclear may not be perfect, but we need every clean energy system. If we go farther down the denial rabbit hole, we might as well start reading infowars.
This article somehow misses the most important thing about nuclear and why it is a key element of the energy transition: It is a carbon free, constant and syncronous energy source capable of providing baseload energy demand and stabilizing electricity grids. From the arguments raised, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding or disregard of how energy systems work; from generation to transimission, distribution, and consumption. That said, I agree with points on time constraints and nuclear's slow building times. They may also be future enemy targets, but I doubt anyone really wants a nuclear war...
We need a safer, cheaper, and faster solution that won’t be a threat to us and the future generations to come. Renewable Energy sources (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, ocean, and biomass) are sustainable and nonpolluting which makes it ideal. Why go for risky and dangerous ones when there’s already a safer alternative solution. Take note that we are in a climate emergency and we need rapid decarbonization - a mass shift to RE can help address that. Future generations are counting on us to save the planet.
Unless you're an energy engineer you don't understand the technical complexities of intermittent power such as solar and wind. Hydro, geothermal, biomass, ocean is not always readily available to all geographical areas. All of these technologies have very low capacity factor whilst simultaneously require a large area to build. Hardest thing to control within the energy system is balancing the supply and load. Solar and wind are very hard to control and balance, plus the low capacity factor (solar is around 20% versus wind 30%) literally makes this very technically inefficient to build and operate. On the other hand, nuclear power has very high capacity factor (often more than 90%), can be ramped up and down as needed to match the load, does not take up a huge amount of space, energy dense (means you use less fuel while still produce a lot of energy), which to the grid operators make a lot more sense technically. Yes there are other issues regarding waste disposal, disaster and security threats.
hydro is dangerous compared to nuclear. and they are still better than coal.
So what do you propose?
I totally agree with this article and the points it puts forward about ‘ why nuclear power is not the way forward’. Also, the incident we just witnessed during the Russian attack on Ukraine when the Russian troops took over the Chernobyl Nuclear Power station, demonstrates the extreme dangers associated with the operation, control and maintenance of these power stations.
The prospect of generating more toxic nuclear waste from the 7 new nuclear power stations Boris Johnson is proposing, is totally unfeasible, when we have no method of disposing of the waste or storing it for hundreds of years. We cannot even deal with our plastic waste and have been shipping it to 3rd world countries. Containers of nuclear waste already lie rusting & deteriorating on the seabed and on land. I imagine this government, given their past history, might apply the same principles and decide to ship the nuclear waste irresponsibly to poor countries or dump it in the sea.
I am ready to protest, to msrch, to add my voice against these most dangerous proposals. This is of utmost importance and poses a terrible danger to our country.
Two words: France. Sweden. Now please explain exactly how it is that nuclear is not an option. The only countries to reverse fossil fuel dependent electric grids (France 70% nuclear and Sweden split mostly between hydro and nuclear) are these two... And they did it 50 years ago.