The West should go nuclear: our irrational fears are costing lives. By Thomas Fazi.

The period between the mid-Sixties and early Eighties was the golden age of nuclear power: hundreds of reactors were built globally, at a rate of 20-40 new plants a year.

Despite growing opposition from environmental groups (often funded by the oil industry) and the general public …, this period was nonetheless characterised by widespread optimism about the potential for nuclear energy to usher in a post-fossil future.

Then, in 1986, the Chernobyl disaster changed everything, instilling in us a comprehensible — but irrational — fear of atomic energy. Nuclear power plant construction plunged, especially in Europe and the US. The incident at Fukushima, in 2011, reinforced those fears, leading not only Japan but also countries such as Germany to begin a phase-out of nuclear energy. With the exception of a few nations — Sweden, France, Finland — investment in nuclear all but ground to a halt in the West.

As of mid-2022, 411 reactors were operating in 33 countries, seven fewer than 1989, and 27 below the 2002 peak of 438. The year before, nuclear energy’s share of global commercial gross electricity generation sunk to 9.8% — the lowest in four decades. Between 2002 and 2021, 98 plants were built (while 105 closed), but more than half of the new constructions took place in a single country: China. Meanwhile, outside of China, there has been a net decline of 57 units over the past 20 years. …

In virtually every country that shut down its nuclear power plants following the post-Fukushima panic, clean energy was replaced mostly with fossil fuels, which polluted the air with their particulates and toxins, increasing cancer and emphysema in the population. Researchers in Germany have estimated the deaths from this switch to be in the thousands each year, or easily more than 10,000 over the past decade. …

A nuclear renaissance is happening now, as the world faces up to curbing carbon emissions and realizes “free” renewable power is a delusion:

Recent months have marked a dramatic recovery for the prospects of nuclear energy across the developed world.

Last year, Boris Johnson launched an ambitious plan to build eight new reactors and 16 next-generation small modular reactors (SMRs), in order to triple domestic nuclear capacity to 24 gigawatts by 2050 — 25% of the UK’s projected electricity demand. …

The US has the world’s biggest nuclear fleet, with 93 reactors providing about a fifth of the nation’s power — and half its carbon-free power. But 13 reactors have been closed since 2013, prompting warnings that, without intervention, half the existing fleet would be out of action by the end of the decade. Japan has also announced, after a decade of paralysis, that it intends to restart 17 of its reactors, which have sat idle since Fukushima. Even anti-nuclear Germany has extended the life of the nation’s last three operating plants, which were scheduled to go offline by the end of last year. …

As of mid-2022, more than 40 of the 53 new reactors under construction were in Asia or Russia, and only four countries — China, India, Russia and South Korea — have construction ongoing at more than one site. …

Renewables are unreliable, costly, and environmentally unfriendly in many ways:

Not only is nuclear energy available around the clock, unlike renewables, it is also significantly more concentrated than wind or solar power, which means that it requires minimal land use. A typical 1,000-megawatts nuclear facility in the United States needs a little more than 1 square mile to operate; wind farms require 360 times more land area to produce the same amount of electricity and solar photovoltaic plants require 75 times more space. …

Safety … check:

Yet, despite its obvious benefits, nuclear energy continues to evoke primordial fears in most people, and is perceived as problematic in terms of safety, waste and costs. Such anxieties and concerns — stoked by decades of misrepresentation in popular culture, media sensationalism, and anti-nuclear campaigns funded by some of the biggest polluters on the planet — are largely unjustified.

In reality, nuclear power has an impressive safety record. In the entire decades-long history of civil nuclear energy, among hundreds of reactors across the planet, there have only been two major accidents where a large amount of radioactive material was emitted: Chernobyl and Fukushima. …

With Chernobyl, 30 people died as an immediate result of the accident, while a UN investigation nearly 20 years after the disaster concluded that up to 4,000 people could eventually die from cancer as a result of the radiation exposure — an increase that in statistical terms would be “very difficult to detect”. … The world’s worst nuclear power accident in history, itself caused by a mind-bogglingly unlikely chain of mistakes, turned out to be far less deadly than many recent earthquakes, hurricanes, industrial accidents or epidemics. As has since been shown, the vast majority of evacuations from the Chernobyl area had no scientific justification.

The disconnect between reality and perception is even more glaring in the case of Fukushima. Most people are probably not aware that, according to studies carried out by several UN agencies, including the World Health Organization, the total number of people killed, either directly through high radiation exposure or likely to die later through elevated rates of cancer in the population, was… zero. On the other hand, the unnecessary evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people is estimated to have caused as many as 1,600 deaths, owing to long-term psychosocial health effects. It is the irrational fear of nuclear energy that kills, not nuclear energy itself. …

The entire volume of spent fuel from 50 years of American nuclear power could be packed into a football stadium, piled 20 feet high. Such small amounts are easy to contain, and current storage and transportation methods have impressive safety records. Moreover, most spent fuel can actually be recycled and turned into new fuel, which is already done in Europe, Russia and Japan — and will increasingly be the case in the future, even as next-generation reactors will produce less waste. …

In the 30-plus countries that still employ it, nuclear energy has not killed anyone, which is not surprising considering it is by far the most tightly regulated form of large-scale energy production in the world, with most plants capable of withstanding the impact of a fully loaded Boeing 767 jet. Our fear is irrational: nuclear is as “deadly” as wind and solar energy — that is, not at all.

Fossil fuels and nuclear fission are just stopgap measures until we develop fusion power, whose commercial deployment is probably only 2 – 5 decades away.