Nuclear power releases no carbon emissions during operation, and has been touted as a solution to power the world’s rapidly growing energy needs.
But while it doesn’t pollute in the same way as fossil fuels, nuclear comes with its own set of environmental problems: among them, indirect emissions from uranium mines, and the risk of a .
In recent months, tech giants Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and have all announced plans to invest in under the banner of carbon neutrality — despite earlier pledges to rely solely on . And with the clock ticking on curbing greenhouse gas emissions to keep global heating in check, some policymakers and financial backers have also come out in favor of a renewed push for nuclear energy.
Is nuclear energy a realistic climate solution?
Nearly two years after Germany shut down its last nuclear reactors, the country’s conservative CDU/CSU opposition has called for . The party also wants to examine the possibility of bringing decommissioned nuclear power plants back online.
With an eye to the , the CDU/CSU election manifesto says nuclear energy “has an important role to play, particularly with regard to climate targets and security of supply.” , the CDU’s candidate for chancellor, has described Germany’s withdrawal from nuclear as a “strategic mistake,” but says it’s unrealistic to think that the last of the nation’s reactors to be shut down could be brought back online.
The is also as part of a “sustainable, serious energy mix,” with chancellor candidate Alice Weidel claiming in a recent interview with German broadcaster ZDF that it has “a CO2 footprint of zero.”
The governing coalition of the center-left Social Democrats and Greens, meanwhile, have both ruled out a return to nuclear, which is also connected to indirect emissions from the long and complex construction process of reactors.
Henry Preston, a spokesperson for the World Nuclear Association (WNA), believes policymakers have become more “pragmatic” in recent years, balancing energy security and the climate emergency while weighing the increased cost and construction timeline with the potential for a “huge amount” of clean energy.
But environmental groups have consistently pointed out that costly new nuclear projects, which typically take around a decade to build after all the planning and permitting, won’t come online fast enough to help meet climate goals.
“A rapid transition requires the use of existing technologies and solutions which can most quickly be rolled out such as renewables, primarily and , energy efficiency, and system flexibility,” said global climate campaigners Climate Action Network Europe in an online fact check.
“Renewable energies consistently outperform nuclear power in terms of cost and deployment speed and are therefore chosen over nuclear power in most countries,” said the 2024 World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR), which called plans to boost nuclear capacity in the coming decades “unrealistic.”
Are small modular reactors a safer alternative?
In the US, Amazon and Google are planning to buy power from small modular reactors (SMRs), advanced nuclear plants with a capacity of less than 300 MW, roughly a third of a standard nuclear plant.
The tech giants have said nuclear will help power the of and data centers, while also meeting their net-zero climate pledges. Data centers and AI today consume between 1% to 3% of the world’s energy supply — a share that some analysts expect to double by 2030.
Data centers need “an abundance of energy that is carbon-free and reliable every hour of every day, and nuclear plants are the only energy sources that can consistently deliver on that promise,” said Joe Dominguez, the CEO of Constellation Energy in the US, announcing a 20-year nuclear energy supply deal with Microsoft in September.
Proponents have said SMRs will be safer, cheaper and quicker to bring online than traditional reactors, and can be built on the sites of former fossil fuel plants. The US partnerships with Amazon and Google are projected to be operational by the early 2030s.
But Climate Action Network has argued against the “empty promises” of SMRs, pointing out that “the technology has not been tested yet at commercial scale.” Globally, only two SMR projects have been built so far, each with reactors of different Russian and Chinese design. They were connected to the grid in 2019 and 2021, respectively.
The WNISR report, funded in part by Germany’s Environment Ministry, pointed out that both projects ran into significant construction delays, taking two or three times longer to build than initially planned. They also went over budget and have so far underperformed on power generation.
The nuclear industry, however, has said the delays weren’t a surprise as the first SMRs built in Russia and China were pilot projects. Future projects now in the planning stages could “potentially come online quicker,” said Preston of the WNA, speaking to DW from London.
But Mycle Schneider, an independent nuclear policy analyst and publisher of the WNISR report, said in an email that this would only be possible with the “reproduction of identical or virtually identical units,” and not SMRs of varying designs, like in Russia and China.
Schneider said the rapidly increasing production of solar panels, grid-connected batteries and wind turbines, of which tens of thousands of units are built each year, represented “truly modular manufacturing” that allow those industries to innovate and rapidly lower costs.
“The nuclear industry has learned from the SMR pilots in China and Russia that nobody wants to reproduce them, and there are no attempts to get them licensed in any Western country,” said Schneider.
Do we need nuclear energy to meet climate goals?
At the 2023 , nuclear energy was for the first time listed among the low-emission technologies needed to achieve the “deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.”
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2022 report also mentioned nuclear, saying it was “unlikely that all low-carbon energy systems around the world will rely entirely on renewable energy sources.”
While conceding that wind and solar are expected to play a major role in the push to replace fossil fuels, energy analysts have often spoken of the , which depends on availability of sun and wind.
Since the Dubai climate conference, 31 countries — among them major nuclear players like France, the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan — . Non-nuclear states like El Salvador, Jamaica, Moldova and Mongolia likewise — though China and Russia, the only two countries that began nuclear reactor construction in the last five years, have not.
The 2024 WNISR report is skeptical of that pledge, however. Listing a slew of potential stumbling blocks — high costs, construction time, lack of industrial capacity — the report pointed out that in order to triple the current installed capacity more than 1,000 new reactors would be needed.
Even with SMRs contributing a significant amount of energy, “hundreds or even thousands of these things would need to be built to come anywhere near that objective,” Schneider said in a December 2023 interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Edited by: Stuart Braun
The post Does a broad expansion of nuclear energy make sense? appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
