The climate crisis is playing out in real time, with ‘once-in-a-century’ (or even ‘once-in-a-millennium’) heatwaves, storms, floods, droughts, fires and other extreme events occurring worldwide with increased frequency, while most countries have failed to meet their goals for reducing carbon emissions. Though the United States is the second largest carbon polluter, the Trump administration is eliminating all climate protection activities from federal programmes and has vowed to ramp up fossil fuel production. Trump himself, while misrepresenting the data about rising sea levels, has said they would merely create some new beachfront property (Trump 2024).

In the real world, where the impacts of a changing climate are deadly and undeniable, the search for solutions has become increasingly urgent. For some years now, the nuclear energy industry, after aligning itself with climate deniers for decades, has tried to reposition itself as an essential component of climate action. Nuclear energy proponents have called for the rapid construction of hundreds of new electricity-generating reactors around the world. Nothing else, they argue, can meet the world’s current and future electricity needs while significantly reducing carbon emissions at the same time.

If there were any truth to the nuclear industry’s claims, they would have to be taken seriously. Readers of this journal will not be surprised to learn that none of them hold up to scrutiny. M. V. Ramana has thoroughly and systematically explained that the much-touted ‘nuclear renaissance’ flounders on unproven and unreliable reactor designs, wishful thinking about nuclear waste storage, and economic sleight of hand. His refreshingly readable book brings to mind Toto drawing the curtain away from the Wizard of Oz and revealing him to be a humbug. A physicist with a distinguished career in science and public policy, Ramana writes with authority about several false narratives that the industry, governments, and the mass media have propagated in the effort to sell nuclear energy to the public as a climate-friendly source of electricity.

He begins with the well-known health, safety, and security concerns related to the handling of radioactive fuel, accident risks (both routine and catastrophic), and the unsolved problems of managing radioactive and toxic waste. Faced with the necessity of persuading the public that new reactor designs will dramatically reduce the risks of another Chernobyl or Fukushima, the industry and its institutional supporters have overstated so-called safety improvements and have understated the health and environmental impacts of those tragedies. The industry has made much of the claim that future disasters will be prevented or, at least, their likelihood reduced by new reactor models and improved safety systems. Ramana refutes this notion with a detailed examination of the technical complexities associated with building and operating small modular reactors (SMRs), thorium reactors, and designs that supposedly extract energy from their own waste products (spoiler alert: they don’t). In each case, new health and safety threats emerge and are compounded by the sheer number of reactors proposed and their global distribution.

For nuclear power to significantly contribute to mitigating climate change, a very large number of reactors would have to be built in countries around the world, including in countries with no operating nuclear plants. Can organizations, across countries and cultures, with multiple priorities, including cost-cutting and profit-making, be expected to follow the demanding practices needed to operate these reactors safely? The answer has to be negative.

Ironically, a changing climate will place additional strains on running nuclear power facilities safely – or even at all: ‘droughts and water shortages, as well as extreme heat leading to a rise in temperatures of water bodies – all of which become more frequent as a result of climate change – can affect the functioning of nuclear reactors’. In fact, ‘in the last decade (2010-2019), the frequency of climate-related nuclear plant outages was already nearly eight times higher than it was in the 1990s’ (32).

With regard to nuclear waste management, solutions are no more apparent now than they were in the previous century. ‘Although the nuclear industry and allied organizations have proposed storing waste from nuclear power plants in geological repositories for decades, not a single one is operational’ or likely to be in the foreseeable future. (54) Were all these new reactors to be built, they would add huge volumes of new radioactive and toxic waste to the already unmanageable amounts that have been in so-called temporary storage for decades. ‘The basic challenge stems from the long periods of time it would take for these radioactive wastes to decay. Over this period, radionuclides will almost certainly migrate into the biosphere’. (51) As if this weren’t disturbing enough, Ramana reminds us that most of the sites identified as potential permanent repositories would be ‘sacrificial zones’ inhabited by marginalized communities, ‘especially far from where the elite typically live. It is not surprising, then, that such elites might think of nuclear energy as a clean source of power’(59).

From a security standpoint, commercial nuclear reactors have always been a source of anxiety because their fuel and their byproducts (e.g. plutonium) can also be used to produce nuclear weapons. More reactors in more countries will only exacerbate the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation. As Ramana explains, however, the problem runs even deeper than dual use. The companies that run nuclear power plants are often the same ones that manufacture nuclear weapons, and the profitability of both industries is inextricably intertwined. ‘Such companies benefit from many channels for overt or hidden cross-subsidies. Their ability to obtain these subsidies is helped enormously by the ideologically powerful argument that an independent nuclear technology base is in the national interest’ (187).

Most of these problems have been well documented for decades, and none of them have deterred the industry and its supporters from pursuing a ‘nuclear renaissance’ as an economic necessity. What makes Ramana’s book most valuable – what makes it a real page-turner, in fact – is his deconstruction of the economics of nuclear power. Not only are the costs of building and operating nuclear reactors exponentially higher than the alternatives, the decommissioning costs, which can continue to accrue for hundreds or even thousands of years, must be built into electricity rates, exploding the myth that nuclear energy could ever be ‘too cheap to metre’. ‘A recurrent problem is the underestimation of costs and construction times by project proponents, both when advocating for investment in these projects and during construction. Often, the correct descriptor is not “underestimation” but “deliberate misrepresentation”’(70).

When compared with the leading alternatives for low-carbon energy production – solar, wind and hydropower – nuclear energy is the most costly and the least likely to be scaled up in time to make a difference for the climate. Ramana cites expert evaluations that electricity from a nuclear plant costs around $168 per megawatt-hour as compared with $34 per megawatt-hour for utility-scale solar energy and $38 per megawatt-hour for wind. ‘Nuclear power’s economic problems will worsen as more renewable energy comes on the grid’(72). To add insult to injury, the nuclear industry absorbs hundreds of billions of dollars in investments and diverts those funds away from the more rapid deployment of technologies that would reduce carbon emissions more effectively, sooner, and at lower cost.

So why hasn’t the nuclear industry collapsed on purely economic grounds? Ramana’s answer is fairly straightforward, and he provides the receipts. There is an enormous amount of money to be made from building and operating nuclear power plants. Decommissioning them and dealing with all the waste is seen as another profit centre. These profits depend, however, on shifting the costs as much as possible from companies and their investors onto the public. This has been done by acquiring tax breaks and subsidies from governments, and getting regulators to approve the front-loading of construction costs into ratepayers’ bills.

The high cost of constructing a nuclear plant, then, is not a problem for the project developers, because they get paid in any case. Indeed, the more the cost, the more the profit to the utility, albeit at the expense of consumers, who will pay more for their electricity.

Moreover, if the project gets cancelled because of unsustainable cost overruns and delays (as has already happened more than once), the public is left holding the bag. ‘Nuclear energy wouldn’t survive without … political patronage’ (133).

Nuclear energy has failed over several decades to provide abundant, affordable energy, and the contention that it can do so in the future is unwarranted. The ongoing consequences of past catastrophes and the predictability of future disasters leave the industry without credibility when it insists that all the lessons about safety have been learned. Even the argument that all of these issues, while legitimate, are offset by the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions is belied by the fact that utility companies often operate both nuclear plants and fossil fuel plants and have no plans to phase out the latter. Utility lobbyists ‘are particularly hostile towards distributed renewables, such as rooftop solar panels’ (122)’

Energy technologies, Ramana concludes, should be tested on whether they can reduce carbon emissions dramatically, be scaled up rapidly enough to make an appreciable difference in mitigating climate disaster, and do so without creating a whole new set of dangers. He makes a compelling case that nuclear energy fails the test on all counts. I wish this book had been written 20 years ago. It needs to be read and heeded now.

Trump on climate change https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4826175-trump-climate-change-not-biggest-threat/.