The Misplaced Menace of Nuclear Power

Ukraine National Chernobyl Museum exhibit depicting the the failed reactor core indicated by blue lights. Photo by Jorge Láscar from Australia, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Two stories in the past week illustrate the critical debate playing out over the world on the question of renewable energy. On March 6, another dire climate change report was issued by the United Nations predicting an existential threat to much of humanity if nations do not immediately reduce their carbon emissions. Two days earlier, the world was fixated on a nuclear power plant in Ukraine being bombed by the Russians. The story of the Zaporizhzhia plant drew much more attention than the U.N. report. CNN spent hours showing the plant and debating its status. The New York Times reported several stories on the plant’s health and its role as a target for Russian forces.

Inevitably, the two stories are connected. The invasion of Ukraine has thrown into stark relief the reliance of Europe on fossil fuels from Russia, a reliance that has helped cause climate change. At the same time, a major alternative to fossil fuels, nuclear power, was demonized for days as a vulnerable part of Ukrainian infrastructure. Pundits on Twitter and elsewhere have even speculated that the attack was a deliberate message to the West, a reminder of the nuclear fears that pushed them towards Russia in the first place.

Fears of nuclear power are primal and engrained. Humans understandably fear the awesome power of splitting large nuclei of poisonous substances such as uranium and plutonium. We are familiar with the stories of nuclear accidents and the specific details of these gruesome events. Nuclear accidents have an immediate, existential nature that is hard for the public to look away from. They involve the spread of radiation that can do unspeakable horrors to the human body. In many instances, they affect civilians and are related to natural disasters that are harming other sectors of society. Radiation can also pollute the environment. Hatred of pollution has fueled much of the anti-nuclear movement over the past five decades.

An important feature of these fears is the incorrect belief that nuclear power plants can explode like nuclear weapons. The nuclear material in power plants is nowhere near as refined as that in weapons. Chernobyl’s nuclear disaster was caused by a steam explosion that released radiation, not a nuclear explosion. No matter the distinction, it is nearly impossible to divorce fears of nuclear weapons from fears of meltdowns and the release of radiation.

All of these fears crystallized following the 2011 nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima reactor in Japan. Day after day brought breathless news coverage of the meltdown, the release of radiation, the number of people affected, and the heroic plant workers who risked their lives to save the country from catastrophe. Overall, one death from cancer seven years later was attributed to the event. The fears stoked by Fukushima pushed the governments of the West to slow down or abandon their nuclear power plans over the next decade. Governments in Germany or the United States could not rationalize the negative news coverage as the result of antiquated Eastern Bloc infrastructure as in Chernobyl. If such a meltdown could harm Japan, one of the world’s most advanced countries, many Westerners believed it could also happen to them.

Nuclear power was not meant to be replaced by more fossil fuels. Instead, the idea was that renewable energy would expand to make up the difference. European countries already seemed to be moving towards full decarbonization. There was more wind and solar power generation everywhere. Battery technology was improving. Green political parties remained sizable. Nuclear power was seen as yet another antiquated energy source that would fall by the wayside just like the use of fossil fuels.

But this rosy outlook was not realized. Instead, governments in Europe simply took the easy way out and turned back to fossil fuels. They prioritized expediency over years of patient investment. In some ways, this shift was necessary. European leaders had to do everything they could to protect their countries from the populist right, which had no interest whatsoever in jettisoning carbon from their economies.

With this nuclear-fossil fuels binary in mind, it is worthwhile to consider the tradeoffs associated with each form of energy production. Nuclear power runs the risk of meltdowns such as the ones at Fukushima or Chernobyl. These events are terrifying to watch on video and can be incredibly dangerous for the people close by. They are also exceedingly rare. The total number of people killed in global nuclear power-related accidents since 1957, not counting potential cancer deaths, is around 50. By comparison, between 2005 and 2019, 83 offshore oil rig workers in the Gulf of Mexico died, only a fraction of the total number of people involved in the fossil fuel extraction industry. Nuclear plants are equipped with regulatory controls and cutting-edge technology to prevent the kinds of meltdowns that have captured the public imagination. They are relatively safe.

This safety is enhanced when compared with the external impact of the fossil fuel industry. According to a recent Harvard study, fossil fuel output kills eight million people every year from pollution. Pipeline spills and leakage from coal ash pits have the potential to contaminate the drinking water of thousands of people. These negative effects do not take into account the effects on climate change and geopolitics.

The key to embracing nuclear power as a stopgap measure towards a greener planet is to understand, minimize, and still accept the risks of nuclear accidents. Stories about nuclear power plants gone rogue must be placed in context. The benefits of decarbonization vastly outweigh the risks of the occasional meltdown. Environmental groups must work more on publicizing the direct health consequences of fossil fuel production, directly tying asthma and other deaths to burning coal and oil. At the same time, they need to drop all opposition to nuclear power outside of targeted regulations that can make the practice as safe as possible.

Nuclear power alone will not solve the climate crisis. Nuclear plants are expensive and take years to go online. Regulations surrounding these plants are cumbersome, and they do not always make financial sense. But the governments of the world have not shown the fortitude needed to let go of carbon without nuclear power. A strategy relying on nuclear power will reduce carbon emissions, decrease the power of petrostates, and make an eventual Green New Deal easier. It is a prospect that liberals especially should embrace.