If Nuclear Energy is So Great, Then Why …?

They are in fact doing this and always have been, and all serious energy systems analyses (i.e. analyses that don’t exclude nuclear a priori, and don’t apply unreasonable constraints or assumptions to nuclear) of zero-carbon energy systems conclude that including significant amounts of nuclear energy helps achieve least-cost outcomes.

That’s for the simple reason that nuclear is both zero-carbon and dispatchable and durable and lean on materials use and compact and not geographically constrained and insensitive to fuel price fluctuations or security of supply issues, making it obviously (to any bona fide scientist) inherently superior to every other energy supply option.

Indeed, major scientific authorities including the IEA and the European Commission techno-economic advisory specifically state that nuclear energy — together with renewables — will remain part of the backbone of the energy system into the future.

All IPCC scenarios that meet the Paris Agreement Climate goals include a role for nuclear, and in most of them (namely the ones with high future economic growth) the amount of nuclear energy grows substantially.

That said, energy system scientists will rarely state that nuclear energy is required to deal with climate and energy security, just like climate scientists rarely state that achieving the most stringent Paris Agreement climate goals is practically impossible. At best, energy system scientists will state that achieving clean energy systems will be “much more costly and difficult” without nuclear, just as climate scientists insist it’s very challenging but “not too late” to achieve the Paris Agreement climate goals.

It’s up to us — the public who evaluate their analyses — to realize that scientists by their nature will rarely declare things to be impossible, or even unfeasible. Scientists are bound to leave drawing conclusions about what’s possible or not to us, the public and politicians, and we must acknowledge and take that responsibility seriously by not waiting complacently for the time when even scientists are forced to tell us frankly “it is now too late to reach our climate goals” or “we must now employ civilian nuclear energy”.

Additionally, there is a class of so-called “energy wonks” who have developed a specialty dealing with all of the known and unknown challenges tied to the complicated, costly and risky attempt by many societies to become “100% renewable” i.e. getting off fossil fuels without using any nuclear energy at all.

These good people have nothing to gain from admitting the relatively straightforward option of simply gradually replacing fossil fueled power plants by equivalent nuclear power plants, and getting rid of the remaining fossil fuels used directly in transport and industry by synthesizing hydrogen or carbon-based fuels using nuclear power plants paired with hydrogen factories.

I think this has been contributing to popular confusion about the expert consensus on the benefits and necessity of nuclear energy, helping to cause politicians in the EU, Germany, France, Belgium and Japan to shut down and demolish nuclear power plants, and build replacement fossil fueled plants, on the suggestion that such outlandish policies would help boost the uptake of renewable energy.

One particularly egregious current example of this phenomenon is Belgium, where the cost of financing the replacement fossil fuel capacity required due to the country’s politically mandated nuclear phase-out is so great that it is threatening the availability of public funds for expanding the country’s green energy supply.

Belgian energy policy chaos has thus reached an unheard of level, buttering the toast of an army of green “energy wonks” eager to continue analyzing, optimizing and consulting on all of it. What they won’t do is what one serious consultancy did do in 2016: warn Belgium that it should not destroy its civilian nuclear energy supply.