a day ago
The 32-year-old nuclear scientist busting the ‘Net Zero myth'
The splitting of the atom was supposed to bring about a new age of abundance. In the world of tomorrow, model families would live beside giant cooling towers in homes running on electricity 'too cheap to meter'. They would get around in cars powered by miniature nuclear reactors, not needing to stop and refuel for thousands of miles. Even the tedium of golf could be alleviated, somewhat, by balls implanted with radioactive material to make them easy to find with a Geiger counter when lost in the rough.
Needless to say, this vision of the future never materialised. While progress was being made, a pair of disasters – Three Mile Island in the West and Chernobyl in the East – dealt a blow to nuclear's reputation as a safe source of power from which it has yet to fully recover.
Humankind now finds itself struggling to end its dependence on fossil fuels. Governments are spending colossal sums to swap coal, oil and gas for wind and solar so they can achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, and progress has been slow. A renewed push for nuclear may be beginning, but many wonder whether net zero can be reached at all.
It was this question that got the scientist and author Dr Tim Gregory thinking and which inspired his new book, Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World. Gregory's argument is simple: what we need is a total rethink of the path to net zero. We should embrace nuclear power and turn decarbonisation into the Apollo programme of the 21st century.
'Certainly, for the foreseeable future, nuclear power represents our best shot of sensibly achieving net zero and producing all of the electricity that we're going to need by 2050 when we're all in electric cars and using heat pumps,' he says from the driver's seat of his car as we float through the vales and hills of the Lake District towards Sellafield, where Gregory works as a chemist.
His book is ordered with the care and precision you would expect from someone whose bread and butter are atoms and subatomic particles. Nuclear power's potential to change the world is enlivened by data and forward-looking policy ideas. Counter-arguments are pulled apart with rigour. But what comes through most strongly is Gregory's enthusiasm. The 32-year-old emits optimism like an exotic isotope emits gamma rays.
'That's one of my favourite things about being a scientist. It's a genuine, incredible source of optimism,' he says over a pea fritter and chips (Gregory is a vegetarian) in Seascale, a village just down the coast from Sellafield that became known as 'the brainiest town in Britain' when the scientists and engineers arrived to build Britain's first nuclear facilities.
The tide is turning
There are already signs the tide may be turning in favour of nuclear energy. Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, announced earlier this week that Britain would spend £14.2 billion on a new nuclear power station at Sizewell C, and Donald Trump, the US president, last month issued a flurry of executive orders aiming to quadruple nuclear energy capacity by 2050.
Until recently, though, Gregory wasn't sure if net zero was possible. 'I was thinking fossil fuels are so deeply embedded in everything we do in society – they just produce too much energy and they're too convenient, they're too easy – that we're going to extract every last drop of oil, every pocket of gas, and every gram of coal, and burn it.' But researching his book turned a hunch into a conviction that nuclear power is the best option for reaching net zero. So what does he think needs to happen?
More nuclear reactors must be built, of course. In Britain, just 10 nuclear reactors like the Olkiluoto-3 reactor recently inaugurated in Finland would eliminate fossil fuels from the grid. The whole of Europe, he states, would need only 170 similarly sized reactors to achieve the same result; the rest of the world, 1,500. An even grander scheme imagines a global fleet of thousands of reactors which together, Gregory calculates, could meet the world's energy demands for a thousand years.
If that seems like a lot, it's because it is. 'That's the scale of the net zero challenge,' he writes. But we have, to an extent, done this before. Take France – after the oil crisis of the 1970s, the country resolved to go nuclear to protect itself from future shocks. Under the slogan, 'In France, we don't have oil, but we have ideas,' 56 reactors were built which, at their peak, supplied 70 per cent of its energy.
'They almost decarbonised their entire grid by accident before anyone cared about climate change,' says Gregory, holding up a chip for emphasis. 'There's a real lesson in that. It's actually possible. The science and technology is there already. We just need to get our act together and deploy it. We're already at about 30 per cent renewables in a lot of countries. What about 30 per cent renewables, 70 per cent nuclear? Then you've done it, and you can all talk about something else and just crack on.'
Gregory was thrilled by Mr Miliband's Sizewell C announcement, which the Energy Secretary described as a new 'golden age' for the British nuclear industry.
'I'm delighted. It's not every day a new 3.2 gigawatt nuclear reactor is announced.'
Yet Britain intends for nuclear power to contribute just a quarter of its electricity production by 2050. Gregory is not a betting man but, if he were, his money would be on France to be the first country to achieve net zero.
Reassuring the general public
Before we can begin building Gregory's fleet of reactors, some hurdles have to be cleared, not least the widespread safety concerns around nuclear power. A short walk from where we are sitting, nuclear waste from Sellafield is periodically discharged into the Irish Sea. You'd think it would be enough to deter even the hardiest wild swimmer, but Gregory is unfazed.
'They pipe radioactive waste offshore just over there,' he says, squinting up the beach towards the nuclear site. 'It's absolutely fine. I go swimming in there all the time in summer.' Sometimes pods of dolphins visit – and he hasn't seen any with three eyes.
A chunk of Gregory's book is devoted to countering 'radiophobia' – the undue fear of radiation that has been stoked by nuclear weapons testing, disasters and popular culture. There was a forensic examination of the impact of the Chernobyl disaster, which occurred when a reactor exploded during a safety test. Gregory estimates that the true death toll – even including cancers caused by radiation exposure – 'likely falls in the region of a few hundred'.
The Fukushima disaster, he notes, has only been linked to a single death, and at Three Mile Island, the worst nuclear accident in American history, 'nobody died, nobody was exposed to anything above background radiation in the surrounding population'. Yet the combined effect of these incidents on our appetite for nuclear power has been extreme. 'We built more nuclear reactors in Europe in the five years leading up to Chernobyl than we have since.'
In the lab, Gregory handles minute samples of some of the most radioactive isotopes on the planet. He and his colleagues wear sensors that measure the doses they are absorbing. Gregory, a 'spreadsheet geek', keeps a running tally but says the amount he absorbs each year is negligible – about the same as you would get from a two-week holiday in Cornwall, where high levels of radon gas in the rocks mean annual radiation exposure is more than three times the UK average.
He doesn't want to downplay the threat to health ionising radiation can pose, but his work affords him a different perspective. 'The people who work with radiation every day are the people who are least afraid of it,' he says. 'We're all living in radiation anyway, all the time. There's no escaping it.' We pause to acknowledge the glare of the sun.
Gregory believes we have no need to worry about nuclear power. But one concern he does not address in the book is the fear that nuclear power plants could become targets for terrorists or a hostile state – as we have seen in Ukraine, where Russia has held the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant hostage. His hypothetical nuclear world is persuasive but exists in controlled, laboratory conditions. 'Everything comes with a risk,' he says. 'The trick is to balance that risk with maximum trade-off, and I would also argue that with more energy, the world would become more peaceful.'
Air pollution – a problem that could be mitigated significantly by an expansion of nuclear power – kills more people every hour than have ever died in nuclear accidents, he notes. 'The sight of those Chernobyl liquidators in their respirators and their lead aprons is so much more harrowing than a slightly smoggy city, but actually air pollution is not just a little bit worse, it's orders of magnitude worse.'
Concerns around the storage of nuclear waste are similarly misplaced, he says. Long-lived waste that takes hundreds of thousands of years to lose its radioactive potency could be used as fuel for breeder reactors, which actually generate more fissile material than they consume. Building a network of these would leave us mainly with waste that needs to be stored for much shorter periods – think hundreds of years.
Much of what we think of as waste is actually extremely useful, finding its way into cutting-edge medical treatments like targeted alpha therapy, which uses a short-lived isotope of lead to destroy cancer cells without harming healthy tissue.
Britain, he is keen to point out, holds the world's largest civil stockpile of plutonium. One hundred and forty one tonnes of the stuff lies in a secure facility somewhere in Sellafield. If recycled, it could power the two new reactors at Hinkley Point C well into the 22nd century. But in January the government decided it would dispose of the stockpile by burying it deep underground.
Learning from Germany's mistakes
And what of global uranium supplies? By going nuclear, are we not simply swapping fossil fuel for a geological alternative? A calculation, which Gregory describes self-effacingly as having been done on the back of an envelope, suggests known reserves of uranium, thorium and recyclable fuel could provide power for 900 years. The 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium dissolved in the world's oceans would do for the next quarter of a million.
'It's a resource like any other – if you can't grow it, you have to dig for it,' he says. 'But there's plenty there to tide us over until we get fusion working. And it's actually quite geographically distributed around the world – it's not like any one country or small group of countries has a monopoly on it, like with oil.'
But what of the cost? Germany's Energiewende – its transition away from nuclear and fossil fuels to renewables, which began at the turn of the millennium but accelerated after Fukushima – provides the perfect counterpoint. Nuclear, argues Gregory, provides much better value for money than any of its rivals. For the €500 billion Germany spent on its 'failed energy transformation', Gregory writes, it could have had 40 reactors like the one built in Finland.
'With that much electricity, plus the nuclear it switched off since 2000, Germany could have entirely decarbonised its electricity supply, eliminated the need for unreliable wind turbines and solar panels, electrified all 49 million of its cars, and still have spare electricity to generate 1.7 million tonnes of green hydrogen every year.'
With large-scale infrastructure projects, Gregory concedes that there is a problem. 'We do seem to have a chronic inability to build large pieces of infrastructure,' he laments. 'It's not just the UK, it's the West in general, and it affects everything from high-speed rail networks to new hospitals to new housing estates, even potholes. There are lots of them around here, as you can imagine, with all the rain that we get.'
Again though, we have done this before. Calder Hall, the world's first full-scale nuclear power station, opened in what is now Sellafield in 1956. Queen Elizabeth II threw the switch to connect it to the grid.
'We used to be world leaders at building nuclear power stations'
We're back in the car and Sellafield is spreading out in the valley before us. A sign warning against the flying of drones flashes by as we come to a halt on a road named after John Dalton, the Cumbrian-born scientist who popularised the idea that the world was made from atoms. (The ancient Greeks got close but it was a 'lucky guess', says Gregory.)
'In the UK, we used to be world leaders at building nuclear power stations, not just quickly but en masse. The median build time in Europe back in the 1970s and 1980s was about six years, which is about what it is today in China and South Korea,' he says, pointing to the stacks where British scientists took the first steps into the Atomic Age.
'There is a doom and gloom in society, and people are demoralised,' says Gregory. 'I don't want to diminish the very real problems that a lot of people face and the big challenges that the UK faces and the world faces, but we are actually capable of doing some really cool stuff when we put our minds to it.' That's where his Apollo programme analogy comes in. 'A massive, concerted effort on the nuclear power front would solve a lot of our problems. And it's totally achievable.'
When he's not in the lab, Gregory is often out promoting nuclear power's green credentials, bringing him into contact with environmentalist groups who are at best ambivalent towards it. Many, like Greenpeace, have their roots in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and are implacably opposed to it, seeing it as linked with atomic weapons, though as Gregory says, 'you can have one without the other'.
He recalled a recent encounter with an eco activist. 'I've read a lot of Greenpeace literature, a lot of Friends of the Earth literature – I haven't just put myself into an echo chamber. But I came away from the conversation with this guy really disappointed by how weak the arguments were. They're either based on things that aren't true, or gut feelings, and energy policy is not something that should be dictated by gut feeling.'
Despite this, Gregory has a surprising amount in common with the naysayers of nuclear power. Raised in Dewsbury by a single mother, he was 'grabbed' by a passion for science at a young age. Bird-watching books, mushroom-spotting guides and encyclopaedias, provided by his mother, fuelled a love of the natural world.
'I've always had a rock collection and a fossil collection. I had a miniature museum in my bedroom and posters of geological timelines and all the rest of it,' he says. 'I used to get the mickey taken out of me at school for loving science and that kind of thing – I used to get called Nasa boy.' Today, he loves nothing more than walking in the fells that surround his home. 'There's a certain awe you get from being out in the mountains,' he admits.
While some find it tough to adapt to the relative isolation of this corner of west Cumbria, Gregory revels in the fact that he is 100 miles from the nearest Pret. He met his wife Amy in a laboratory at Sellafield, and the pair married in a pub having bonded over a shared love of ale. Beer-making, he says, 'is the best kind of chemistry, after all'.
He rejects the popular view that achieving carbon neutrality means sacrificing quality of life. For example, 'I hate paper straws. They're an example of bad technology. They make me really resentful, actually,' he says.
Really good green technology, he says, should instead be about replacing something with an alternative that is not only more environmentally friendly, but is actually better – like the LED light bulb. 'That's exactly the kind of technology that we should be implementing more of. It's better than what it replaces in its function, and it's cheaper and it's better for the environment. It's perfect. Who can argue with that?'
He is similarly irked by 'greenwashing' and uses a brief section of Going Nuclear to interrogate Greta Thunberg's fabled transatlantic yacht voyage to the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019. While she may not have racked up any air miles getting there, the same cannot be said for a crew of five who had to fly to New York to retrieve the vessel and sail it back to Sweden. 'Of all the things in my book that might get me cancelled, the opening to that chapter might be one,' Gregory says.
Ultimately though, he feels he is mostly on the same page as the environmentalists, and indeed sees himself as one, of a sort. 'The aims of the environmental movement are really good, and I think most people would agree with them. We all want a cleaner world that's more sustainable – exactly the kind of view that we're enjoying now,' he says, pointing out Blencathra as it looms up out of the landscape.
'I really do think the penny is dropping that renewables on their own are just not going to do it, but with nuclear, it's like both sides of the debate win – everybody gets what they want.'
So what does Gregory's vision of the future look like? Regrettably, the nuclear-powered car doesn't come into it, though he expects every town and city will have one or more of the emerging breed of small modular reactors providing their power, alongside solar panels and wind turbines. In fact, the nuclear city of the future may not be unfamiliar to us today.
'It doesn't have to be fundamentally different, that's the point. Nuclear power is already Europe's biggest source of emissions-free energy by quite a long way, and that's really surprising, and the fact that it's surprising is really telling, because nobody notices.'
The Energy Coast, as this part of west Cumbria is known, provides a glimpse of such a future. Locals are big supporters of the nuclear industry and Gregory reckons they would be thrilled if a new reactor opened and Sellafield began producing power again. The same cannot be said, however, of a planned solar farm down the road. 'Everybody's kicking off about it. Nuclear is the thing around here – people are really proud of it.'
Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World, by Tim Gregory, is published on 12 June (Bodley Head, £25)
