Europe’s Nuclear Power Divide

Climate activists oppose its use even as alternatives lead to increased emissions and rising electricity prices.

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Last week was a big week for the Fridays For Future, the environmentalist group inspired by Greta Thunberg. Thunberg spoke at a large rally in Berlin on Friday before hundreds of thousands of followers, launching what seems to be the big comeback for the climate-action movement in Europe following months of restrictions on large gatherings due to the pandemic. In 2019, about 6 million protesters had joined the movement on the streets, demanding more radical policy changes to tackle climate change. “We must not give up, there is no going back now,” said Thunberg, appealing to her supporters to keep pressure on European governments.  

But one incident from the demonstration illustrates a large divide in Europe over how to achieve the goals of the environmental movement. A pro-nuclear environmentalist was violently attacked by the surrounding crowd, having her sign removed and destroyed. Even as climate activists push to eliminate carbon-based fossil fuels, many in the movement remain opposed to nuclear power. 

For example, the European Union is presenting roadmap after roadmap, accompanied with legislative packages that will have political institutions busy for years. Europe is tasking itself with overhauling the aviation sector, road transport, agriculture, fuel taxes, it’s cap and trade rules, the approach to trade negotiations, and sustainable finance. All of it has precise targets: reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 55 percent by 2030, climate neutrality by 2050, a ban on the sale of new fossil-fuel powered cars by 2035. For the latter, EU member states will need not just  to update their charging infrastructure which leaves much to be desired, but also improve the energy grid altogether. In Europe the most significant contributor to CO² is the energy sector, which is why decarbonizing it appears to be a primary objective. Once energy production is decarbonized, then electrified high-speed rail, as well as EV road traffic, are genuinely carbon-neutral.

The production of nuclear energy through fission presents the advantages of using up a small amount of space, and producing large quantities of energy with no notable carbon footprint. Adding to that, nuclear energy does not present the volatility downsides that renewables have, meaning a year of bad wind or a particularly cloudy sun won’t affect the power grid. In fact, electrifying the road transport network will also mean diversified peaks in electricity use (charging times will also be high in the evening when users are not working)—while challenging for solar power in particular, is not a problem for nuclear production. Renewable energy necessitates technological improvements in electricity storage capacities, which nuclear energy does not. But the dangers posed by nuclear plants and concerns over storing waste cause many environmentalists to oppose the adoption of nuclear power.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    So far in Germany, renewables or bust looks like bust.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Ben Connelly

      And if we figured out how to safely power submarines and aircraft carriers with nuclear power plants we can do it safely on land.

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    Phil H

    For the life of me, I don't understand why people who are anxious to get off fossil fuels are not embracing the one power source that can replace fossil fuels at scale -- nuclear power.

    That those concerned advocates instead want to embrace wind and solar, which are inadequate substitutes, indicates they are more interested in =ideology, than solutions.

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    1. Ingenero.lux

      There was a time when nuclear power wasn’t what it now is - the Atomic Energy Commission was too focused on technological boosterism and too little focused on safety, the industry could be sloppy without a safety focus, and there was a definite bubble in nuclear power plant production - see WPPSS for one. Then Three Mile Island happened almost the same time as Jane Fonda’s film “China Syndrome” came out, and public opinion turned on the industry. The craziest part is that TMI both caused mass panic and a massive shift in the nuclear industry, moving towards a focus on safety that borders on obsession (in a good way - nuclear technology has definite hazards and they need to be the subject of constant vigilance.). In the same time period, the AEC was replaced with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with research and promotion of nuclear power moved to the Department of Energy so the new entity was and is entirely focused on safety and security. So even as the country became very worried by nuclear power, the industry and regulatory environment became ever more focused on safety. I think a lot of the issue stems from the past, especially since the formative years for the environmental movement were at the same time as nuclear power boosterism, insufficient safety focus, and Cold War worries about nuclear war. There was a time when things in the nuclear industry were very broken and massive change was needed. The problem is that now, when the environment in the industry is very different and modern power plant designs incredibly safe, there are many people who only think of the bad old days or, worse, are panicked by the hazards of nuclear power (real and overhyped or imagined) and have no clue about the real hazards of renewables or the massive downsides to the technologies. That’s not helped by innumeracy, renewables boosterism, and politicians who like to pretend there are only upsides to trying to run the country on sporadic and very spread-out power sources that have low availability and require massive amounts of energy storage. I think most people simply do not understand how much goes in to actually trying to make renewables work.

      I’m all for solar power - if it’s on orbital satellites that beam power to the Earth’s surface (an entirely feasible technology that eliminates a ton of the problems with terrestrial solar power generation but requires a great deal of investment, even if it would pay off in the long run). As that’s not remotely what’s being offered, I’m more than skeptical when told renewables will solve climate change, make tons of great US jobs, and have no downsides whatsoever.

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        Phil H

        I'm not sure that solar power satellites are without their problems, such as the danger of the radiation that transmits that power to Earth. On nuclear power, you are entirely correct, to the safety and the history, which I remember well.

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        1. Ingenero.lux

          On microwaves:
          https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/16/health/a-conversation-with-eleanor-r-adair-tuning-in-to-the-microwave-frequency.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

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        2. Ingenero.lux

          The main proposals are to use microwaves, which are non-ionizing and very well studied (there have been outdoor studies with animals exposed to microwaves long term, and the Air Force has long used microwaves to heat large buildings that are otherwise prohibitively expensive to heat). With the power densities proposed, there’s no danger to people or animals.

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    David Chen

    As much as I enjoyed the HBO Chernobyl series, I cant help but think it hurt this cause.

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  4. BA

    Am I only the only one who thinks Greta Thunberg is one of the most annoying people on this planet?

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    Man-Eating Cow

    To me, this has been something like what economists call "revealed preference." Don't take seriously how people talk; take seriously how they spend their money.

    Some longtime environmentalists have, to their credit, at least reluctantly embraced nuclear power. To me, that says they are sincere in wanting to find practical ways to a cleaner world.

    Too many still refuse. Their reasons for doing so sound pretty anti-humanistic to me.

    I'm old enough to have been for both nuclear power and environmental causes as a teenager. When the environmentalists turned against nuclear power, I turned against the environmental movement. I believe solar energy can be an invaluable supplement to nuclear, but cannot replace it. All other noncarbon energy sources are boutique.

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    Derekdouglas

    Renewables are an unserious proposition for modern energy production. It is too expensive, unreliable, and has a massive physical footprint.

    The construction of, from shady China produced solar panels, to destructive mining of rare earth materials for batteries, will have far more negative environmental impacts than natural gas, clean coal and nuclear.

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      Ed P

      A lot of people told the Wright brothers they people could never fly. Don’t let shortsightedness get in your way.

      Technology is being developed at an accelerating pace. We will sustainable, renewable ways to make our energy. It’d help move things along if our government would put some of the societal costs of burning fossil fuels into their consumer sale price and use those funds to ease taxes elsewhere.

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    Ed P

    Its a thorny issue. Trading one major environmental problem for another might help in the short term…but that toxic nuclear waste has half lives hundreds of years long. We don’t have any place to out any of it here in the USA. It is a real problem, even before we get into the very high price tag to operate in the best of circumstances.

    But it is immediately scalable and has zero carbon pollution. So I think we’re going to have to live with it on a moderate basis while we figure out how to scale other carbon free energy production.

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    1. Joe Higashi

      I’m not sure what kind of nuclear waste has a half life of hundreds of years. What are you referring to specifically?
      Generally there are two kinds of waste in the spent fuel: fission products and long-lived isotopes.
      The fission products are dangerous, they are very radioactive, and aside from the useful ones (e.g. ones used in radio medicine, iodine, cesium, etc) the only thing to do with them is store them. But, “very radioactive” also means a short half-life. It has mostly calmed down in 5 years or so.
      The long-lived isotopes are just nuclear fuel to be reused. (Plutonium-239 has a half life of 24000 years). We should just reprocess it and put it back to work. I read a paper on this that claimed that our current known US uranium reserves could fully power the US for 1000 years if we just did the reprocessing. It’s bizarre that we just bury the stuff.

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      1. Jvspringrose

        Coincidentally, I viewed a movie on Amazon Prime last night ("Paradox Promise" or something like that - produced I believe in 2017), that, among other things, claimed that 1/2 of the U.S. nuclear power then produced came from nuclear fuel reprocessed from nuclear warheads purchased from the Soviet Union/Russia as part of the disarmament process. True? If so, your comment that "long-lived isotopes are just nuclear fuel to be reused" is demonstrably proven.

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        1. Joe Higashi

          I don’t know if the 50% number is right, but that was a very important program. Here’s an article about it.
          https://str.llnl.gov/content/pages/april-2013/pdf/4.13.3.pdf
          That said, it doesn’t really prove my reprocessing claim because that program was dealing with Uranium, not Plutonium. Look up “MOX” for the most commonly used plutonium reactor mix.

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  8. @Fakejohn

    So everyone singing the praises of nuclear here are just going to gloss over the Godzilla problem nuclear creates?

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      Man-Eating Cow

      I, for one, welcome our new lizard overlords.

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    Frank Lee

    This opposition to nuclear clearly demonstrates that the "climate activists" are driven by an agenda other than concern about greenhouse gas impacting the environment. So much of what has been clearly telegraphed by the current regime of political and media control is an agenda for destroying western industrialism and limiting bottom-up enterprise to be replaced by top-down totalitarian control leading to a liberal global new world order plan. Plentiful and cheap energy is anathema to that worldview.

    So it isn't really about saving the environment... it is about power and control.

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    Paul Britton

    Not “it’s cap and trade rules”. Possessive form is “its”.

    “. . . its cap and trade rules.”

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      Paul Britton

      Credit to the editors, though, for attaching a “[sic]” to Thunberg’s misuse of “its” when “it’s” was appropriate.

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        Aylene Wright

        I would give her a break for being young AND not being English (or American).

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          Paul Britton

          You are a kind and forbearing person!

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