Nuclear is Not the Solution is an important book that clearly presents the arguments why nuclear power is not the solution to climate change, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh

The prominence of arguments about nuclear power within the green movement varies, but whether they are a major controversy or just a rumbling disagreement, it seems that they are always there. For some, nuclear power is an essential part of our low-carbon energy mix, in fact the lowest-carbon form of energy generation we have. Without it, they believe, we will not be able to balance the inherent intermittency of wind and solar power. In this view, a non-nuclear future will therefore leave us either facing stringent power austerity or trapped in fossil-fuel dependence. The cautionary tale here is the way in which Germany’s greenhouse-gas emissions from power generation increased between 2011 and 2013 because, following the shutdown of six out of their seventeen nuclear power plants in reaction to the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, they had to fall back on more coal power.ⁱ For the anti-nuclear side, though, nuclear power can never be part of a clean, safe power-generation system.

Nuclear versus renewables: costs and time

Which side Ramana is on is clear from his title, and he sets out here a succinct and convincing case against nuclear power. As he shows, the idea that nuclear will be an ideal partner for renewables in a low-carbon grid is not actually realised. Studies of countries shifting either towards renewables or towards nuclear show that it tends to be either/or: nuclear power does not complement renewable energy generation, it crowds it out. Nuclear power companies certainly regard renewable energy generators as their competitors. Ramana quotes an executive from Exelon, owners of nuclear power plants in Illinois, complaining in 2021 about how wind power from out of state had the ability to depress power prices (p.73).

The idea that nuclear provides a predictable backup for unpredictable renewables is also, Ramana argues, overstated. It underestimates the extent to which nuclear plants are subject to unplanned shutdowns because of safety issues, including, ironically, the effects of extreme weather. In August 2023, for example, EDF had to extend a planned outage at its Golfech 2 plant in south-west France as a heatwave had raised the temperature of the water used to cool the reactor too much for it to operate safely.

Another significant obstacle to nuclear playing a role in a low-carbon future is the often barely credible increases in the cost of nuclear projects from commissioning to construction, and the long timescales involved. The obvious example here is the UK’s Hinkley Point C, the estimated costs of which were supposed to be an already considerable £16bn in 2013, but which had swelled to £33bn by 2023. This might feel like a familiar story about UK infrastructure projects in the age of privatisation and austerity, but, at least where nuclear is concerned, it is not purely a UK problem. Ramana points out that the French nuclear plant at Flamanville has cost a comparable amount to the Hinkley Point C estimates once adjusted for the differences in planned output.

Given the complexities of nuclear power, it would not be reasonable to expect nuclear plants to be either cheap or quick to build. The extremely long time it can take between a nuclear plant getting governmental go-ahead and it actually producing electricity does though call into question how far nuclear can be a credible response to the urgent climate crisis. Hinkley Point C is an example here, since it was approved in a government white paper in 2008 but may not be fully operational until 2031. Similar plants elsewhere have also suffered very long delays: Finland’s Olkiluoto plant finally started output in 2023, having been originally scheduled to start producing electricity in 2009, while Flamanville is currently eleven years behind, having been scheduled for completion in 2013 but being now only expected to reach full output by the end of 2024.

These extreme delays are largely to do with specific problems with the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) design, but no nuclear reactor design has proved easy to keep to time. The average time taken for a nuclear power plant to go from the start of construction to the start of operations between 2011 and 2020 was just under ten years (p.80), not including the time taken for planning and fundraising, which might well add another decade. Given the short time we have to move power generation to low-carbon methods, it is difficult to see how nuclear can credibly compete with renewables here. Ramana points out that in comparison, the average time taken to build a utility-scale solar plant is around two years.

Supporters of nuclear power might object that the failure to control time and cost in major infrastructure projects should not be held against the infrastructure concerned. The delays in nuclear construction are problems to be solved, not reasons to reject nuclear power. There is however a more fundamental argument against nuclear power: its safety.

The normal accidents of nuclear power

As Ramana points out, politicians championing nuclear power will invariably describe it is as safe, precisely because of the wide recognition that it is anything but. For nuclear supporters, the popular perception that nuclear power is dangerous is irrational ‘radiophobia’, a product of hype around a few high-profile nuclear accidents and people’s illogical tendency to connect nuclear power with nuclear weapons. People fail to understand that nuclear power stations are not nuclear bombs and allow a media obsession with Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima to turn them against a clean, safe power source.

In fact, the argument goes, the history of nuclear accidents show how safe nuclear power really is. The official death toll for Chernobyl, the most serious nuclear accident, stands at 54, while, as the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency told delegates at COP26 in 2021, officially no one died from radiation at Fukushima (p.40). Historic accidents like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island are in any case the product of past nuclear-reactor designs and safety practices, while modern reactors are supposedly much safer: US company NuScale, for example, claimed of its nuclear reactor that it had only a one-in-a-billion chance of a meltdown even if hit by a hurricane (p.25). If the result of that one-in-a-billion chance would be only a handful of deaths at worst, the argument goes that despite its bad name, nuclear power must be very safe indeed.

Ramana sets out how this is entirely too rosy a view of the safety record of the nuclear industry. In part, this is the result of a profit-driven industry which in many countries has been allowed essentially to regulate itself, with predictable safety results. This matters because, as Ramana says, when we are considering if nuclear power can be the solution to carbon emissions from power generation, it is the actual safety of the industry at which we must look. ‘What we should be interested in is not whether reactors can be safe, but whether they will be safe’ (p.59). Proponents of nuclear power therefore need to show how they will get to a more effective nuclear-safety regime, something that is unlikely to be achieved while the approach is still to allow the nuclear companies effectively to mark their own homework.

The safety failures of the nuclear industry are however only part of the problem. It is clear from Ramana’s discussion of nuclear safety that any honest review of even the theoretical safety of any nuclear reactor would have to conclude that the likelihood of an accident would be much higher than one in a billion, even with no laxity or corner cutting. This is because the complexity of nuclear reactors in all sorts of ways makes them vulnerable to ‘normal accidents’: accidents occurring because of the structural characteristics of the system.

Nuclear’s exposure to normal accidents can’t be completely overcome with safety systems, which are of course necessary, but which introduce further complex interactions and therefore ways to fail. Nor is it likely that this basic vulnerability can be disappeared through improved design, despite the claims of many in the nuclear industry. Ramana comments that the passive safety systems proposed by the nuclear industry may be more uncertain in their behaviour than the active systems they replace. None of the much-vaunted new proposed designs for nuclear reactors, from small modular reactors (SMRs) to EPRs, are likely to prove to be the breakthrough in safety that their supporters claim they are. Indeed, the difficulties in getting EPRs online at all suggest that these may not be the answer to fears about nuclear safety.

The reality is that with installations as complex as nuclear reactors, the ways in which things can go wrong are almost limitless. There is no end in sight to the entirely unforeseen, such as happened at the Japanese nuclear plant at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in 2007, where an earthquake allowed electrical cables to move downward, creating an opening in the reactor’s basement wall and letting radioactive material escape into the sea. No one had realised that this was even a possibility; a Tokyo Electric Power Company official confessed that it ‘“was beyond our imagination”’ (p.27). As nuclear plants are affected by the extreme weather of the climate crisis, these sorts of unforeseen failures are only likely to become more common.

Consequences of nuclear accidents

The fundamental issue for nuclear safety is that nuclear reactors are inherently dangerous operations, made safe only through complex engineering. Seen in this light, that they can operate at all is impressive, but it does mean that the safety systems, active and passive, are essentially staving off the inevitable, rather than providing assurance on a technology that is basically safe. The arguments of supporters of nuclear energy about its safety are therefore necessarily two-fold. In the first place, accidents are incredibly unlikely, but in the second place, even if they do happen, they don’t matter very much. As Morris Rosen of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said ‘Chernobyl shows us that even in a catastrophic accident, we are not talking about unreasonable deaths.’ⁱⁱ

There are many, such as Kate Brown in her excellent Manual for Survival, who have argued that the toll of death and disease from Chernobyl was far higher than the official count of 54 people killed by acute radiation poisoning in the days and weeks following the disaster. Ramana’s is necessarily a much briefer consideration but comes to a similar conclusion, that while the final number of premature deaths as a result of Chernobyl will never be known, it is likely to be significant.

When multiple studies and the real-world experience of Chernobyl have shown that there is no safe threshold for radiation exposure and that exposure to even low doses can cause serious health problems, this of course has implications for that confident statement that no one died as a result of Fukushima. It is also the case that we should be thinking about the effects on lifetime health of nuclear accidents, not just fatalities. Ramana also points out that childhood thyroid cancer, the health effect which even proponents of nuclear power have to accept is a consequence of radiation exposure, is not a minor health issue but something with lifelong consequences. While it is possible to live without a thyroid gland, children whose thyroids have to be removed as a result of cancer will suffer a range of permanent health problems, even if the cancer does not spread, which is by no means guaranteed.

The health risks of nuclear power are not restricted to those unfortunate enough to have been exposed to the famous nuclear accidents. The now long history of nuclear power and nuclear weapons testing may well have given populations around the world significant health problems, even if these aren’t always identified. As Kate Brown recounts, for example, when researchers attempting to study the effects of Chernobyl on local people tried to use Muscovites as an unaffected control group, they found that they were in many cases as exposed to long-term radiation as Chernobyl cleanup workers.ⁱⁱⁱ This experience of whopping but secret doses of radiation in civilian populations is not restricted to the USSR, as shown for example by the experience of people who lived close to the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado.^iv

Nuclear power and nuclear weapons

When the safety risks of nuclear power are set out in this way, you would be forgiven for wondering why anyone, government or activist, would support its continued operation, let alone its expansion as a solution to the climate crisis. For working people, nuclear power has one significant advantage over renewable energy generation, in that nuclear power jobs tend to be highly skilled, well-paid and in large workplaces with a high degree of union organisation. As Matt Huber points out, when considering ‘which energy forms contain bases of working-class power… nuclear is clearly a winner.’^v The comparative isolation of nuclear power plants also means that the plant is often the major employer for the entire area; an employer whose closure would be an economic disaster. In contrast, jobs in renewables tend to be comparatively insecure and poorly paid, with, in the US, the lowest levels of unionisation in the electricity-generation industry.

These realities cannot be ignored by the climate movement, as they all too often are. It is the case however that they aren’t necessarily inherent to the different types of energy generation, or permanent. Ramana points out that the nuclear companies are attempting to reduce their reliance on skilled labour with modular construction and other changes in order to bring down their labour costs. On the other hand, nationalised, democratically controlled renewable energy generation could provide skilled, well-paid jobs.

The reasons why so many governments are committed to nuclear power, apparently at whatever cost, are unlikely to include a concern for decent, well-paid jobs for their citizens. The difficulty of making renewable energy generation profitable, as set out recently by Brett Christophers,^vi does however create a space for nuclear in governmental calculations. If a full-scale shift to renewable energy generation would require taking electricity generation into public ownership, throwing subsidies at private companies to persuade them to undertake nuclear projects, as successive British governments have done for EDF for Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C, can seem more in line with neoliberal principles.

The primary reason though for government enthusiasm for nuclear power is the connection with nuclear weapons. Supporters of nuclear will often portray objections to nuclear power on the grounds of nuclear weapons as a moral rather than a practical stance. There is no real link between the two, they will argue, we are just making an emotive argument that nuclear power is somehow tainted by an unwarranted association with its military relative. It is, they will say, perfectly possible to have nuclear power and not nuclear weapons, and nuclear reactors do not go up like nuclear bombs.

One difficulty for this argument is that there is some evidence that the reactor at Chernobyl did, in fact, go up like a nuclear bomb.^vii The links between nuclear power and nuclear weapons are actually far more material than these sorts of dismissals wish to allow. As then Under-Secretary for Energy, Richard Harrington, told parliament in 2018, separating civil and military nuclear is an ‘artificial distinction’ and the Ministry of Defence should be ‘include[ed] more in everything we do.’

Ramana sets out how a country embarking on a nuclear power programme will necessarily be amassing the trained people and the expertise required also to build nuclear weapons. This represents a considerable financial contribution from civilian power generation to the military. In 2019, the Atlantic Council estimated that civil US nuclear ‘human capital’ contributed $26.2bn to the US nuclear weapons programme.^viii While the uranium enrichment requirements of many nuclear reactors are not the same as those of nuclear weapons, there is no inherent barrier to using the same technology to achieve both. This is, Ramana notes, why Iran’s centrifuge programme was such a concern to the US, precisely because developing a civilian nuclear power programme also opens the door to nuclear weapons (p.172).

The centrality of the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons was summarised in 2020 by French President Macron, when in a speech on the future of French nuclear power, he stated that ‘without civilian nuclear power, there would be no military nuclear power, without military nuclear power, there would be no civilian nuclear power.’ This connection does not simply apply to states which already have nuclear weapons, but shapes whether or not a country will pursue nuclear power at all. Ramana argues that Saudi Arabia’s declaration in 2010 that nuclear power was essential for them was in reality a statement that if Iran was to gain nuclear weapons capabilities, they would have to do so too (p.166).

The inherent connection between civil and military nuclear also drives the types of nuclear reactors countries choose to pursue. Ramana outlines how the needs of nuclear weapons shaped the designs of nuclear reactors from the beginning. The preponderance of light-water reactors, for example, is because these are designs most suitable for use in nuclear submarines. There is also evidence that the USSR had persisted with the nuclear-reactor design used at Chernobyl, despite knowing that it was flawed, because it was better than alternative designs at producing plutonium for their nuclear weapons programme.^ix

It is unlikely that this essential link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons will be severed any time soon. Theoretically, thorium reactors could provide nuclear power without any concomitant weapons capabilities, but Ramana notes that this remains only a theoretical possibility; so far, no one has got a thorium reactor to work in practice. It is worth noting here that there is no demonstrable interest in a nuclear power programme without nuclear weapons capabilities. As Johnston and Stirling point out, ‘what has become clear in recent years is that the countries that tend to pursue intense nuclear new build programmes tend to be established or aspiring nuclear weapons states.’^x

The inherent connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons has shaped the adoption of nuclear power around the world. This means that consideration of nuclear power as a response to the climate crisis cannot be decoupled from concerns about nuclear proliferation. It also means that any realistic analysis of the suitability of nuclear power as a global solution to the climate crisis has to take into account geopolitical realities.

Ramana notes that only 36 countries currently have nuclear power and attributes the failure of some countries’ nuclear programmes to the complexities and costs involved. There is undoubtedly something in this, but it does rather understate the extent to which the US in particular has acted to prevent countries from acquiring nuclear capabilities unless and until they acquire a regime acceptable to US interests. One reason, for example, that Ghana does not have nuclear power is because the US first refused to help them develop it, then, when then-President Nkrumah got the necessary help from the USSR, toppled him and shut the new reactor down before it could come online.^xi Using nuclear power to reduce global emissions would necessarily have to widen the pool of countries permitted to have the technology far beyond the US and its reliable allies. The possibility of this happening appears, to put it mildly, unlikely.

As Ramana makes clear, nuclear power is not an answer to the question of how we can provide the world with cheap, clean power. Civilian nuclear power programmes exist to provide the answer to a different question, how countries can create and maintain nuclear weapons capabilities while attributing large parts of the cost to the civilian power generation rather than to the military budget. If it were not for nuclear weapons, no one would be arguing that nuclear power was either safe or sensible. It might be a low-carbon option, but it is no part of any just transition to a sustainable future.

i Luigi Grossi, Sven Heim and Michael Waterson, ‘The impact of the German response to the Fukushima earthquake’, Energy Economics 66, (2017), pp.450-466, p.450, The impact of the German response to the Fukushima earthquake – ScienceDirect.

ii Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Penguin Books, London 2019), p.22.

iii Brown, Manual for Survival, p.136.

iv Kristen Iversen, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Shadow of a Secret Nuclear Facility (Harvill Secker, London 2012).

v Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War. Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, London and New York 2022), p.251.

vi Brett Christophers, The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet (Verso, London and New York 2024).

vii Brown, Manual for Survival, p.148.

viii Phil Johnston and Andy Stirling, ‘Hidden Military Implications of ‘Building Back’ with New Nuclear in the UK’, Responsible Science 3 (2021), pp.11-14, p.12.

ix Brown, Manual for Survival, p.54.

x Johnston and Stirling, ‘Hidden Military Implications’, p.12.

xi Susan Williams, White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa (Hurst Publishers, London 2021), p.512.