8 hours ago
Forget Greta Thunberg's greenwashing – this is the energy of the future
In 2019, Greta Thunberg travelled to the UN Climate Action Summit in New York by boat. Eschewing the evil aeroplane, she crossed the Atlantic aboard a 'zero-emissions yacht' festooned with solar panels; it took her a fortnight. Very virtuous: but the yacht's skipper then flew home to Europe, and another crew of five flew from Europe to New York to sail the boat back. 'In the end,' Tim Gregory remarks in Going Nuclear, 'Thunberg's voyage produced more emissions than if she and her father had just taken return transatlantic flights.'
Nonetheless, Thunberg's self-congratulatory stunt has been credited with strengthening the Nordic movement called 'Flight Shame' (Flygskam), which tries to make people feel bad about flying. Gregory's target in this book, instead, is what you might call 'nuclear shame'. We have been conditioned, he laments, to think that radioactivity is terrifying, and that nuclear power stations are absurdly expensive and liable to blow up. As a physicist who works at the National Nuclear Laboratory in Sellafield, Gregory knows better.
Assuming one agrees with the ambition to reduce carbon emissions to 'net zero' by 2050, he argues, more nuclear power is the only sensible way to do it. Wind and solar power are great but intermittent. 'Biomass' is just a sciencey-sounding label for burning wood and pretending its carbon emissions don't count. We can pass over rapidly the 'de-growth' movement of radical economists who fantasise about drastically reducing everyone's standard of living. At some level, the environmentalist disdain for nuclear power is a symptom of their hatred and distrust of technology and human civilisation itself.
Many sacred cows of the green zealot are thus energetically slaughtered. A nuclear power station, Gregory accepts, is not 'emissions-free' when you count mining the uranium and building the plant, but its lifetime emissions per watt of energy generated are comparable to those of wind and solar. The confirmed death tolls of all nuclear accidents are remarkably small in comparison to the far greater numbers killed by pollution from coal. And to neglect nuclear generation in favour of focusing on 'renewables' – as Germany notoriously did after the Fukushima accident, shutting down all its reactors – actually condemns you to using more fossil fuels (in this case, Russian gas) in order to provide baseload power.
But nuclear, critics say, takes too long to build. It needn't, Gregory retorts: the median time of a new build globally is only 6.4 years. The delays and cost overruns of Hinkley Point C admittedly 'make nuclear power look farcical', but just look at other bureaucratic farces such as HS2. Meanwhile, between 2019 and 2024, the UAE built a fleet of nuclear reactors that now powers a quarter of the country.
What about nuclear waste? Well, the 'low-level' kind, which makes up 87 per cent of the total, includes things like gloves and lab equipment, most of which is 'far less radioactive than a banana'. The world's stockpile of the most dangerous 'high-level' radioactive waste ever generated would fit in a cube 33 metres across. You could re-use much of it as fuel in other reactors, or bury it deep underground, like the Finns do.
This book is a highly engaging and lucid primer on nuclear technology. Gregory also describes some fascinating advances in nuclear medicine (better-targeted radiotherapy) and 'atomic gardening' (using radiation to find new crop strains). And he celebrates the nuclear batteries that power our exploration of the universe via space probes such as Voyager and the Mars rovers.
Going Nuclear is also, in some ways, a lament for a retro sci-fi future. Just as we never got flying cars, we never got electricity that was, as early nuclear enthusiasts notoriously promised, 'too cheap to meter'; nor did we get nuclear reactors on the Moon. (Gregory is winningly fond of 'vintage technology that never saw its full potential').
But, Gregory argues, we still could have these things, and the second-best time to start is now. The scolding doominess of much climate activism, he suggests, is silly and counterproductive: 'Informed optimism is far superior.' Nuclear energy was the future once; maybe it will be again.
