Is Nuclear Power the Answer to Solving the Climate Crisis?

Since its inception, Nuclear Power has split opinion and so we thought it was time to explore why, and ask if Nuclear has a place in a net zero future. Whilst renewable power such as wind and solar will always come up on top, their intermittency might leave space for this zero carbon often controversial power source, to make up at least a fraction of the grid. Rising energy prices, managing nuclear waste and a plight for energy security and it looks like we may well have to ask ourselves some serious questions about Nuclear. Join Dr Helen Czerski as she finds out more.

0:00 Introduction 
0:50 A brief history
3:15 When renewables won't do 
5:20 What is radioactivity? 
6:15 What about nuclear waste? 
8:56 Who pays for nuclear waste? 
11:25 Do we even need it?! 
12:20 How much do we need? 
15:10 Trade offs to get to net zero 
16:25 Double the Electricity! 
17:03 Join the discussion

Become a YouTube member: use JOIN button above Subscribe to Fully Charged & the Everything Electric channels
For Clean Energy and Home Tech take a look at the @EverythingElectricShow

#cleanenergy #nuclear #energy #climatechange #climatecrisis #electricity #renewables #wind #solar #battery #electricvehicles #industry #netzero

[BobHannent]

The important fact: coal plants not only emit carbon dioxide, they also emit significant amounts of other pollution, INCLUDING radioactive particles. Coal is slightly radioactive and when you burn it some of the particles in the chimney are radioactive.

[jcnewman]

I can never understand why geothermal is not considered as an alternative to nuclear. If we are happy to go to all this effort and expense to dig holes in the ground to bury nuclear waste. It can’t be beyond us to drill down to harness the heat of the earth to generate power. And, we have a load of technology and skilled labour from the fossil fuel industry that have the experience and expertise to help get it done as well. 🤷‍♂️

[denniseuanmorgan]

What is needed is an audit on the price of oil/gas subsidies and the full price we pay for the construction maintenance and decommissioning of these nuclear power plants and the storage of the nuclear waste from them. I think it will be in the hundreds of billions! I feel the British public do not have any idea of the total cost of these subsidies and charges. Some party/ organisation should publish these figures in the media.

[marvintpandroid]

Can you take a look at the radiation released by coal, the deaths caused by coal or as a side effect of its use in terms of deaths.

The fear against nuclear power has been exploited by the fossil fuel companies.

[GoCoyote]

As an opener, I was always told that if you really want to know the bias of any system, follow the money. When looking at how nuclear power is funded and sold, we can get a clearer picture as to it's actual efficacy as a power source. It is only second to the oil and coal industry for direct taxpayer subsidies. In inflation adjusted dollars, the US nuclear electric power industry has received on average 3.5 billion dollars a year since 1947 of direct taxpayer subsidies. Compare this to renewables that has received 0.38 billion dollars a year since 1994 in direct taxpayer subsidies. Yes, you heard it right, 0.38 billion, or 380 million per year for 40 years, compared to 3, 500 million per year for 76 years.

This does not include a lot of hidden costs to taxpayers, but that is another whole subject. Depending on the amount and type of subsidies received, owner/operators then have to sell the power to customers and try to recoup their unsubsidized costs. Depending on how the utility is structured, and its relationship to the owner/operator, the utility will be allowed to pass on varying levels of power plant construction, power production, decommissioning, and ultimately, waste disposal costs to customers. This leads to utility customers bearing and subsidizing the higher costs of nuclear power, often through opaque system of billing. At this point, not a single nuclear plant produces power that could be sold for a profit on the open market without the subsidies received, since it cannot compete with even unsubsidized utility scale wind and solar, or combined cycle gas, or even some coal.

Some nuclear plant operators, trying to make themselves profitable, have been fined for trying to operate as lagging source power (peaker plants) instead of leading source power (baseload plants) as they were designed and operationally permitted for. Operating a nuke plant as a peaker plant greatly increases operational risks that they are not designed for. It is like asking a 747 passenger plane to be used as jet fighter: they are just not designed to maneuver that quickly.

Then there is Insurance. Early on in the nuclear industry, insurance risk assessors looked at nuclear power plants, and gave their opinion of the risk costs, and applied that to insurance premiums. It took the already incredibly high cost of nuclear power, and made it stratospheric. So then was born the Price Anderson Act to subsidize the cost of insurance to nuclear power. It only required each commercial reactor/s owner to carry a small amount of liability insurance (now 450 million) for each reactor owned. Then this first tier of liability insurance is supplemented by an industry self insurance program, where all of the owners of all 92+/- currently operating reactors are supposed to chip in up to 131 million for each of their reactors for any accidents, hopefully without going bankrupt.

All told, the total theoretical accident liability insurance available would be a total of about 15 billion dollars for an accident similar to Fukushima with 4 involved reactors. As Fukushima is expected to exceed 1 trillion dollars in cleanup costs, that would leave about 985 billion dollars to be covered by US taxpayers. This Taxpayer Self Insurance is a hidden subsidy to the nuclear industry. The average site premium is around 1.3 million per year for the 450 million in coverage. If we extrapolate that out to 1 trillion in coverage per site, that is an equivalent to 2.888 billion dollars in insurance premiums for each reactor site in the US, EACH AND EVERY YEAR! Yes it is assuming that they would not be under insuring themselves, but even if the premiums were halved, and then halved again, they would be astronomically high. Far higher than the value of any power produced.

Even building nuclear power plants puts companies at extreme financial risk. The most recent nuclear power projects in the US bankrupted the builder, Westinghouse Electric, and caused it's parent company Toshiba financial ruin trying to build two projects using "fast modular design" reactors.

As a teenager in the late 1970's and early 1980's, I was reading about the carbon foot print of nuclear energy. At the time we had decades of information and studies that had been done on the overall infrastructure needed to build and fuel nuclear power. As an electrician who has worked on nuclear power plants, I can attest to the incredible amount of material needed to build nuclear compared to conventional power plants. From redundancy to safety systems, the reactors and isolation system, fuel storage and pumping systems, nuclear power requires millions of tons of material more than conventional power, most of it very carbon intensive.

To mine fissile materials is becoming increasingly carbon intensive, as all of the easily mined fissile materials have been already mined. What is left is deeper underground, so either we can drill deeper mines, or move more overburden. There is also the types of ore. Soft rock and hard rock ores, are just that. Soft rock is easy to break up to allow the extraction chemicals to work, while hard rock ores require much more energy to break apart. I am sure you can figure out which one has been already mined first.

In the late 1970's, some non-nuclear industry funded studies put nuclear power CO2 production to be slightly better than that of natural gas, but that was without factoring in decommissioning and waste disposal. Now that we have plants that have been decommissioned, and decades of short term waste storage, some of those same independent studies put the CO2 production of nuclear up there with coal.

Then there is the waste. In the 1950's and 1960's, when most nuclear power plants were being designed and built, people did not truly understand the dangers of nuclear waste, and they just assumed that we would come up with disposal solutions as time went on. This has turned out to be much more technically challenging than people imagined. Nuclear waste continues to produce heat and decay particles that eventually destroy all of the containers they are put into, causing it to leak out into the surrounding environment.

A lot of people try and downplay the effects of radiation, often likening exposure by comparing it to the amounts we are exposed to while flying in an airplane. This is a very misleading false equivalency, since radioactive particles released into our environment continue to produce dangerous radiation for up to millions of years, and will be either inhaled into lungs through the air from dust, or ingested into plants and animals that will then become parts of our bodies. Flying in a plane is like standing to close to the camp fire and having ones skin get uncomfortably hot, versus the internal damage caused by swallowing some red hot coals that stay hot for years causing continuous internal damage.

At this point, there are very few places on earth that are now considered possibly viable for long term waste storage, and fewer yet now storing waste. Areas around them then have to decide if they want the added risks of thousands of tonnes of radioactive materials being shipped through their communities.

Temporary dry cask storage containers for high level waste are 100 to 150 tonne behemoths of steel and concrete with 1 to 5 tonnes of high level waste sealed in with helium gas. It is hoped that they will last for 50 to 100 years, but 25 years has been the norm for now, with some failing within 5 years. This means that the waste must be put into new 100 to 150 tonne containers of steel and concrete every 25 to 50 years. While we are all hoping to decarbonize steel and concrete production, we have not yet done so, so the carbon footprint of nuclear waste storage is astronomical. The handling and transport of these materials adds lots of risks and costs, and is a highly technical process. We cannot just drop it in a hole and cover it in concrete, and then assume it will stay in place. the concrete will start to crumble and crack from the heat and radiation, and then release the radioactive materials into surrounding materials. Our earth is a very dynamic place underground, with lots of water moving around in aquifers, with a lot of that being pumped out for use by humans now. We cannot just politely ask the waste to stay put, and expect it to do so.

In my opinion as an IBEW electrician, the nuclear industry gets incredible support for two reasons: One is that it is an engineers wet dream about the mythological sexy atom. The other is because of the incredible trough filled with taxpayer and industry money that politicians and industries can feed from. A normal combined cycle gas power plant might have 200 to 300 electricians working at the peak of employment during construction, while a nuke plant can have 2 to 3 thousand electricians at peak. That is a lot of union workers getting top dollar, and making lots of overtime.

I don't mind my tax dollars going to roads, schools, social programs, and infrastructure, but I hate seeing it wasted to line industry pockets just for the easy money, when so many people who need real help get nothing.

[PEdulis]

"We don't want to rely on foreign countries for our fuel." Really? Where are the uranium mines in the UK to feed the nuclear plants? How much of the uranium used in the UK is actually Russian?

[dstarley]

I work for a company involved in the nuclear industry, and there are so many misconceptions about nuclear even within the industry itself. The number one problem with nuclear is TIME. The number of years it takes to bring new reactors online simply isn't compatible with the time we have to reduce energy related emissions, whereas wind and solar can be massively scaled within just a few years. Nuclear is part of the solution (as shown in the IEA scenario in this video) but nowhere near as much as some people believe it should be. If we lived in a world where capital funding was readily available for everything then sure put it into nuclear, but where finance is constrained it is better (for climate change) when invested in renewables right now. Willing to be challenged on this view.

[waywardgeologist]

I thought FC would do a deeper dive into the topic instead of just skimming the surface. As one example, China is currently running a test reactor using molten salt and thorium. It doesn’t require water to run and the fission products are have shorter half life’s. Can you please at lease send one of your crew to do a video report on this new reactor?

[BobQuigley]

Born 1952 in Pittsburgh. 1958 first commercial reactor came online just down river from Pittsburgh. Toured the plant as a Catholic schoolboy in 1965. Built by Pittsburgh based Westinghouse using a design from nuclear submarine. Two large foundational mistakes made. One was military insisted reactor design could make bomb grade material. Two high pressure water reactor had many single points of failure. Similar designs were replicated without better understanding of downsides. Our library had books claiming we could use nuclear bombs for tunnel building, for military aircraft. Westinghouse eventually collapsed and sold to Toshiba. Toshiba bankruptcy put it in hands of private investors. Three mile island catastrophe also in Pennsylvania. Coincidentally Pittsburgh's heritage was coal, coal, coal. First commercial oil well Drakes well just north of Pittsburgh was drilled with a wooden bit! Oil was readily available. Today Western PA's heritage is countless abandoned methane spewing wells. Areas riddled with hundreds of miles of empty coal mines. Mine subsidence strikes even today as property's collapse. Water fills the mines, leaches millions of tons of toxic metals, dissolved iron which pollute streams on large scale. The used coal slag heaps are legendary! From opening of Carnegie's steel mills in 1800's till late 1970's the railroads that hauled the slag had the greatest tonnage of freight (although poisonous) in the world. Great swaths of groundwater polluted. River's waters undrinkable till very recently. From my birth to 1962 air pollution so bad you had to drive with headlights on at noon on the sunniest days. Grandma swept her porches soot off multiple times per day. IMO nuclear at least should not be curtailed assuming the plant passes safety standards. Waste fuel in US has been used as a political punching bag instead of having discussions on how best to store. We've already built two burial sites one of which is near the testing grounds of nuclear weapons, land that's useless anyway yet politicians block their usage. We're burning through over 100 billion barrels of oil equivalent fossil fuels annually globally. Adding 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases pollution to our shared atmosphere annually. In addition fossil fuels are critical to civilization today to make nearly every product imaginable. Burning them for transportation and electricity genocidal. Lastly there's no OIL FAIRY REFILLING THE HOLES! Will add if the rest of US adopted California's conservation regulations we could buy time to do what can, must, will be done! Thanks to Fully Charged and it's team of presenters for tackling this mess.

[davidpowell]

I'm glad Helen presented this, and it was a better video than about nuclear power than I have come to expect from Fully Charged Show. I hope future episodes will be more detailed and more even handed.

In this episode renewables were presented as the best solution, with no attempt to let viewers know that nuclear has lower or comparable lifecycle CO2eq emissions, which is a pretty big omission. Here are the figures for two prominent major studies:

UNECE Carbon Neutrality in the UNECE Region (2022): Integrated Life-cycle Assessment of Electricity Sources, lifecycle emissions (in gCO2eq/kWh):
Hydropower 6–147g
Nuclear (fission) 5.1–6.4g
Solar (CSP) 27–122g
Solar (PV) 8–83g
Wind (offshore) 12–23g
Wind (onshore) 7.8–16g

IPCC WG3 AR5 Annexe iii (2014), median lifecycle emissions (in gCO2eq/kWh, including albedo effect):
Biomass (dedicated) 230g
Geothermal 38g
Hydropower 24g
Nuclear 12g
Solar (CSP) 27g
Solar (PV rooftop) 41g
Solar (PV utility) 48g
Wind (offshore) 12g
Wind (onshore) 11g

Of course to fairly compare nuclear to wind and solar on a level playing field, you have to add additional emissions to wind and solar for storage or backup generation. The UNECE report mentions in the electricity storage section that adding 4 hours of 60-MW storage to a conventional 100-MW PV system would increase its greenhouse gas emissions 4–28g gCO2eq/kWh depending on battery chemistry and solar irradiation, which is quite significant.

If you would like more factual information about nuclear power and waste, then I suggest checking out Sabine Hossenfelder's YouTube channel.

[Hyfly]

I would love to know the aggregated kilowatt hour cost including the lifetime total of commissioning and decommissioning and storage of waste

[NiklasAuinger]

Great introductory video! I would also like to see you cover some of the key benefits of nuclear energy compared to renewables in a bit more detail: high energy density, small land footprint, low material intensity, highest EROEI of any power source, extremely low carbon intensity and of course dispatchability (keeping the lights on when wind and solar do not deliver)

[dayofjackal]

I remember your video from 6 years ago. What has changed since then? From 'most expensive electricity', to 'we definitely need a base load'. I remember; 'storing energy is much cheaper than nuclear'. Yeah, a lot has changed since then!

[NicholasBryantBonzaiSequoias]

Geo-thermal is the third option! Why spend billions (as we are at Sizewell C) on nuclear, when geo-thermal is quicker to bring on-stream. Using the same technology as oil drilling (rigs at sea..) would leverage existing infrastructure and skills.
Continually renewed (by the Moon), and ceaselessly producing output.

I am still surprised at how nuclear sells itself as 'clean' low carbon energy (as if nuclear plants appear by magic!) when in fact there are a great many emissions from fuel production, construction, waste processing to de-commisioning at end of life.

[howardgale]

Wow - I have just been enthralled by the comments and it is clearly a live debate. That got me thinking what do I want to know more about.
1. The actual risks of fall out… we worry about nuclear facilities in our country, but these are the ones we can control, what about the ones down wind?
2. How small could an SMR be and what is the value?
3. What makes up nuclear waste… I think a lot of people this is is the fuel rods, but I think it is much more.
4. Can we reuse the waste to generate more energy?
5. Can we use lower yield fuel sources, which reduce the risk?
6. If a nuclear power station is a standard design… why does it take so long to build?
7. Base load sounds great…. But if the idea is to use nuclear power when the wind does not blow. This is no-longer base load it is dynamic…. Can nuclear plants run like this?

[DanielSann]

Using nuclear "for the last 5-10%" as a load-following plant is madness . Nuclear reactors work way worse when used modulating the power output, they degrade faster and the cost/kwh skyrockets, they are not built for that. Nuclear would be best used for the base load (energy even in the middle of the night is required for lights/industries/fridges ecc). A nuclear reactor can work easily 93-99% of the year and needs to be shut down only to change the bars or for periodical maintenance.

[samuelgeiger]

What I am missing in this is an answer to the question of where does the fuel come from? How much carbon emissions created during the mining and refining? And how much carbon is produced in the construction of a nuclear power plant.

[perengstrom]

Three things. One: most of the nuclear fuel waste isn't waste, it's fuel with 95% energy left in it waiting to be used again. Two: it is hard to recoup the cost of maintenance if you only can run the reactors at full capacity a fraction of the time. Less wind and solar means more revenue for nuclear making it more economic. Three: we want wind and solar, but we need nuclear. Need wins over want. If we need nuclear to keep us alive in the cold and dark of winter, why would we want anything else in the energy system making things more complicated and more expensive?

Forget wind and solar, go 100% nuclear, it's the logical decision. Nuclear energy gets cheaper the more you use it. Adding wind and solar just make the energy system more complicated and expensive. The waste isn't a problem, partly because it isn't just waste, it can be recycled in advanced reactors, and partly because it isn't that much of it considering how much energy it brings. After a second run the fuel needs storage for a blink of an eye (500 years).

[kqschwarz]

I am not nuclear scientist (physician), but I am a nuclear supporter. I have a question. Both the main commentator (sorry I didn't catch her name) and another guest speaker both either said directly or implied that nuclear was needed to "fill in the gaps" left by renewables. The guest speaker went on to say that nuclear needs to ramp up when renewables are low and vice versa ramp down when renewables are peaking. Again, I am not a nuclear scientist, but isn't true that nuclear reactors are not good at "ramping up" and "ramping down" with a short time constant? I thought I remembered something about nuclear reactors generating Xenon gas when ramping down that takes days to clear before they can be ramped up and that the Xenon gas keeps the moderating control rods from controlling the rate of nuclear fission. My understanding was that a ramp down followed by a ramp up was the root cause of the Chernobyl disaster. Perhaps you could shed some light on how nuclear reactors can moderate the highs and lows in the grid created by renewables. Perhaps it might require a follow-on video. Thank you and Fully Charged for everything you do to save the environment.

[BugMagnet]

Loved how careful and fair this complex issue was discussed. Usually it always deteriorates to either a bashing of the german nuclear exit or a one liner calculation showing how bad nuclear does on the price sticker.
Personally I think that well maintained nuclear reactors should be kept running for their designed lifespan. Meaning not shutting them down to have them produce "only" 98% of the expected waste in their timeline. We already have a big issue with the radioactive waste that already needs solving. There is no dodging it even if we shoot all reactors at the moon. That is the foul compromise we probably have to make to save millions of tonnes of CO2 without making the nuclear waste problem noticeably worse.

But installing new reactors now? That is a really odd idea, unless a country has some freakish boundary conditions to contend with. With the price development of renevables it is cheaper to build up an overcapacity of wind, then toss a lot of that energy into electrolysis, make hydrogen, e-methane or amonia from it and use that in fuel cells, gas turbines and what have you. Yes, it will be twice as expensive as using the renewable power directly but that is:
a) still cheaper than nuclear power
b) necessary since long term power storage needs a beyond battery solution because of the gargantuan energy amounts involved in that issue and because batteries are crucial for mobile applications and rare as it is.