Will nuclear energy help us to solve the climate crisis?

The track record of Nuclear Energy is everything else than convincing. To put it black-white, nobody, with the exception of China, Northern Korea and Iran, buys nuclear power plants. The industry in the West is dead as a dodo. I could stop my post here, but the illusion that nuclear energy can save us from climate change comes back again and again, in all shapes and colours. A discussion is necessary.

We do need reliable 24/7/365 baseload electricity, and indeed we need much more of that to transition transport and industry to non-fossil. Science tells us that we need to cut CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions by 50% every decade.

Could nuclear energy deliver? There are a few significant problems:

The time problem:?Planning, permission and building of nuclear installations takes at least 10 years. In Finland, building the 1600 MW Olkiluoto-3 reactor took 17 years. It may go on-stream in April this year. Unless planning, permission and building time is shortened significantly, nuclear energy can contribute earliest in a decade from now. By then, we will have to reduce CO2 already by 50%, using existing wind, solar and heat power technologies.

The supplier problem: Western companies have stopped building nuclear power plants. We could choose suppliers from non-democratic countries like China and Russia. Also, the nuclear fuel comes to a great extent from suspect and unreliable countries.

The cost problem: New nuclear power plants such as Hinkley-C in Great Britain are reported to produce electricity at above 100 €/MWh versus current wholesale costs and costs of wind and solar of about 30 €/MWh. Heavy industry (steel, chemicals, paper etc) needs low cost and stable electricity. For those industries, nuclear electricity is way too expensive. (the complexity of the cost issue is discussed in https://medium.com/generation-atomic/the-hinkley-point-c-case-is-nuclear-energy-expensive-f89b1aa05c27 ).

The safety problem: fortunately, nuclear engineers have learned from various disasters. However, safety improvements in the current and future fleet of nuclear reactors come at significant costs. Nuclear installations are targets for terrorists and sabotage; they require costly security measures. ?Waste disposal should theoretically be possible in stable geological formations, but it has never been demonstrated. I hope (for future generations) and I am reasonably confident that such disposal is theoretically possible. But hope is not a good strategy. Proof is needed. Further, theory and practice are two things. The example of the German “Asse” mine (https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-waste-in-disused-german-mine-leaves-a-bitter-legacy/a-47420382 and ?https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/nuclear-clean-costs ) shows that waste handling even in highly industrialized countries typically ends as a total mess.

The Powerpoint problem: ?many nuclear technologies, such as generation IV reactors, small modular reactors, lead cooling etc. exist on Powerpoint or as prototypes, but not in reality. R&D, like on thorium reactors is certainly necessary, but these technologies are immature and cannot help us in the next 10-20 years.

Conclusion: ?it is perfectly fine to argue for nuclear power plants. However, we need to decarbonize by 50 % in the next decade. How could nuclear possibly help in this period? Capital needs to be invested now into energy saving, utilizing waste heat, deploying solar, wind, geothermal and storage facilities. When (often uninformed) politicians propose nuclear energy as the solution for the climate crisis without at the same time presenting a credible plan for decarbonization in the short term, it appears to me as wishful thinking, cheap attention seeking or worse.