So… to summarize the argument: we have to build nuclear plants, even though they are the most expensive renewable per kWh and they take the longest amount of time to build (even by the author’s “fast” timeline standards) because we don’t have batteries that can store wind and solar energy, even though there are multiple emerging potential solutions that could result in days-long storage capacity.
Not buying it. I don’t buy the “unsafe” argument but I also don’t buy this argument
The thing is that the well-known nuclear catastrophes, at a minimum all resulted in fairly large areas right in the middle of civilized land being lost to humanity for the foreseeable future. So, even if overall death rate is only somewhat higher than for e.g. wind energy — wind energy does not lead to such devastating local effects. The other thing is, nuclear needs skilled teams to manage plants at all times, even when they’re shut off. As soon as your country goes off its routine because military coup!, nuclear plants become a massive danger. Also, nuclear plants can make for devastating attack targets during a war (obviously the attacker would need to value mayhem and defeat above colonizability).
And finally, nuclear danger is (within human time frames:) eternal because you need to store some materials safely for a very long time; “nuclear semiotics” is an actual thing studied by scientists somehow — yet I’ve never heard of “oil semiotics” or “solar semiotics”.
The way I see things, the unsafe part is more related to how capitalism works, more than anything else. Capitalism is not a safe system.
Super-briefly, time and money related to: planning, maintenance, decommissioning, and last but not least, nuclear waste.
Imo and due to climate emergency, we’d be better putting the money that would go for nuclear towards renewables. Let’s keep in mind that numerous nuclear projects were funded with enormous amounts of money for 10-20 years, to be abandoned before producing any electricity.
Days long doesn’t work if there’s not enough wind and sun, for example in the winter in the north (here in finland we have exhausted our hydro potential already btw)
“Emerging”- what does that mean? Whats the timeline on them? The failure rate? The cost at the scale needed? I mean if you’re gonna complain about nuclear being more expensive then the batteries need to be cheaper necessarily. Also what materials are they made out of?
I suppose you know don’t about the superbattery projects already implemented, e.g. the one in Australia and its huge benefits to their grid?
About sodium based batteries which have become commercially viable in recent years?
And because of the implication also that nuclear reactors produce extreme waste of building materials (e.g. Greifswald, ran for 26 years, dismantling in operation since 35 years and projected to last till 2040 at least, because higher contamination than estimated) and mining for them is at least as bad as for Lithium?
How often do you think it would need to supply a whole state? Australian states are massive.
I’m in NSW, and from memory, I can think of a few power outages that took down a few tens of thousands of homes for a few days. Most are much smaller. That’s in a state with a couple of million homes. So at most a few percent of the state. So even in a worst case scenario maybe you still get a day at full power. If you ration it out to essential services, then a lot longer.
This is all ignoring the fact that most outages are grid related, not generation related, which means that nuclear would be of no help, but a somewhat distributed battery backup system could be massively useful.
This was built entirely in 16 months, from groundbreaking to connection to the grid. For the cost of a single nuclear reactor you can build 30 of these. And opposed to nuclear technology batteries are still making remarkable progress in their affordability.
Edit: Btw the battery also uses below 0,5% of the area of a usual nuclear plant.
And because of the implication also that nuclear reactors produce extreme waste of building materials (e.g. Greifswald, ran for 26 years, dismantling in operation since 35 years and projected to last till 2040 at least
Ah, yes, the good ol’ “force plants to close way before the end of their design lifetime due to anti-nuclear hysteria, and then use that truncated amortization as an excuse to dishonestly claim they were too expensive” argument. Works every time!
Maybe you should look the mentioned case up before making your argument.
Greifswald had 6 blocks in 1990:
4 blocks which were in very bad state, cracks in the pressure chamber with a high probability to release nuclear material into the environment. Due to these faults they were already shut down since 1987, except block 1 which was run against the recommendations of the security agency. To continue running them they would have to be rebuilt, completely. This includes dismantling them which as we now know would have taken many decades!
Block 5 and 6 were under construction. (Started in 1970, planned for 1980) But mistakes were made during the construction, postponing it till 1990, when finally no energy company at all wanted to take over the risk of running it.
So Greifswald was shut down. Not to spite you, but because both security of the general population and financial aspects didn’t allow running it anymore.
(It had already two near disasters which where kept hidden and only became known because of the fall of the DDR)
I don’t agree with @grue’s at all, but I think we can still agree that Greifswald appears to be an outlier in that it was especially badly built and managed. This fuckup of a plant is probably not indicative of every other plant.
On the one hand, yes it is. On the other hand the general average also does not seem good.
There are many reactors which had similar, but not as bad histories. Kozloduy NPP (BG), Zion Nuclear Power Station (US), Ignalina (LI), Shoreham, Bohunice, Superphénix, …
While reactors which have run without noteworthy problems make up not even half of the total, which is far below anything which should be the norm for public infrastructure.
Lets take Germany as example, which fits quite well due to half of the countries having very lax requirements (DDR) and half having strict ones (West-Germany)
We have 7 Reactors which where built but never operated due to safety concerns (3 in Greifswald)
We have at least 4 sites (with at least 8 reactor blocks) with major issues, besides Greifswald we have e.g. hydrogen explosions (Brunsbüttel), turbine fires (Gundremmingen A), transformer fires (Krümmel). These are just the ones I found with a quick search.
We have another 9 reactor blocks with minor issues like Grundmemmingen B (Bavaria), lets pick this one at random and name the minor incidents: 2 Workers killed by boiling steam explosion (1975), short circuit leading to 3m of contaminated water at 80°C in the building (1977), failed sealing leading to automatic shutdown and repair (2008), failed rods emitting 500-fold the allowed amount of radioactive gases into the atmosphere (2011), another 4 incidents which have not yet been made public and really minor issues like value issues.
We have about 10 with only minor issues. Stretching from Emsland with only 2 known small leaks to Grafenrheinfeld where there were sudden shutdowns and a fire which nearly reached the main reactor but was extinguished in time.
In fact during looking this up I haven’t found a single reactor which ran a significant time without any incident, even if I do not count construction issues which were caught and fixed in time before they resulted in incidents.
Tbf, steam explosions, turbine and transformator fires aren’t exclusive to NPPs. Just nobody cares if these events happen in any other thermal power plant.
The incidents exclusive to NPPs are those where (potentially) radioactive substances are emitted into the environment.
First there is a reason for that, as all major incident and even many minor incidents (see above) release radioactivity. Often into the environment in very minor cases only into the reactor building and the workers.
Secondly its wrong. Yes incidents do happen in normal plant too. But any remotely major ones also make it into the news. Actually they do it more often as the plants are not as remote and as huge that you wouldn’t notice them. As you can see 4 incidents haven’t been made public in Grundmemmingen B, I don’t know of a single one which has not been disclosed for years with coal/gas plants.
Lets pick a random sample of 10 German coal & gas plants from the Wikipedia list:
(Kraftwerk Bremen-Mittelsbüren[49]Gemeinschaftskraftwerk Bremen (GKB)[52]Industriekraftwerk Bremerhaven[1]Industriekraftwerk Breuberg[53]Egger Kraftwerk Brilon[1]Kraftwerk Burghausen[1]Industriekraftwerk Marl[1][2]Kraftwerk Clauen[1]Heizkraftwerk Cottbus[55][2]GTKW Darmstadt[57] )
We have 8 with no incidents at all, notable Bremen-Mittelsbüren which runs since 1964!
Special mention also for Marl where the plant didn’t have issues, but the chemical factories around it, oh boy!
We have 2 with Issues, a complete list:
Fire in turbine, nobody hurt (Clauen)
boiler explosion 3 hurt, 2 dead (Brilon)
So in total you have less issues than with a single average atomic reactor and only 20% of the list had issues. Why is that so? First these systems are simple. The only contain comparatively few parts, you can access almost everything for inspection without special gear and notice and fix any faults before they even have a chance to become a problem. Secondly they deal with lower extremes. The steam circuit has less pressure, the power for the transformers is lower.
This also hold for the huge ones, e.g. the 4 Datteln plants where only Datteln 4 had a major fire incident with no deaths. The oldest one running 1964-2014, longer than any atomic reactor in Germany.
When you look to wind turbines incidents are even more rare. We have currently about 28600 wind turbines in Germany, of these 129 had incidents like damage to the blades. 8 towers collapsed so 0.5% with issues and 0.02% with major ones. (And these issues concentrate on the first turbines built)
So… to summarize the argument: we have to build nuclear plants, even though they are the most expensive renewable per kWh and they take the longest amount of time to build (even by the author’s “fast” timeline standards) because we don’t have batteries that can store wind and solar energy, even though there are multiple emerging potential solutions that could result in days-long storage capacity.
Not buying it. I don’t buy the “unsafe” argument but I also don’t buy this argument
Edit: this same publication that published this op-ed published a pretty negative review of this book, funny enough: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jun/02/going-nuclear-by-tim-gregory-review-a-boosterish-case-for-atomic-energy
The thing is… nuclear is even more expensive than battery capacity combined with smart power management.
Ftr, Uranium is not renewable.
The thing is that the well-known nuclear catastrophes, at a minimum all resulted in fairly large areas right in the middle of civilized land being lost to humanity for the foreseeable future. So, even if overall death rate is only somewhat higher than for e.g. wind energy — wind energy does not lead to such devastating local effects. The other thing is, nuclear needs skilled teams to manage plants at all times, even when they’re shut off. As soon as your country goes off its routine because military coup!, nuclear plants become a massive danger. Also, nuclear plants can make for devastating attack targets during a war (obviously the attacker would need to value mayhem and defeat above colonizability).
And finally, nuclear danger is (within human time frames:) eternal because you need to store some materials safely for a very long time; “nuclear semiotics” is an actual thing studied by scientists somehow — yet I’ve never heard of “oil semiotics” or “solar semiotics”.
And Russian Uranium even less so … which is what much if Europe uses.
The way I see things, the unsafe part is more related to how capitalism works, more than anything else. Capitalism is not a safe system.
Super-briefly, time and money related to: planning, maintenance, decommissioning, and last but not least, nuclear waste.
Imo and due to climate emergency, we’d be better putting the money that would go for nuclear towards renewables. Let’s keep in mind that numerous nuclear projects were funded with enormous amounts of money for 10-20 years, to be abandoned before producing any electricity.
Just a few relevant links:
In that regard, the socialist system, at least how it was implemented in Eastern Europe and the USSR, wasn’t any better.
For socialism in the context of the so-called communist countries, I agree with you.
For socialism in the context of the nordic model, I am not sure because I am not well informed about how they have handled nuclear power.
Edit: Regardless of the past, it’s capitalism that has prevailed globally for now, so currently this is what we have to deal with.
Days long doesn’t work if there’s not enough wind and sun, for example in the winter in the north (here in finland we have exhausted our hydro potential already btw)
“Emerging”- what does that mean? Whats the timeline on them? The failure rate? The cost at the scale needed? I mean if you’re gonna complain about nuclear being more expensive then the batteries need to be cheaper necessarily. Also what materials are they made out of?
I suppose you know don’t about the superbattery projects already implemented, e.g. the one in Australia and its huge benefits to their grid?
About sodium based batteries which have become commercially viable in recent years?
And because of the implication also that nuclear reactors produce extreme waste of building materials (e.g. Greifswald, ran for 26 years, dismantling in operation since 35 years and projected to last till 2040 at least, because higher contamination than estimated) and mining for them is at least as bad as for Lithium?
If not ask the search engine/ai of your choice.
This one?
If so it would supply just New South Wales for only 20 minutes. Hardly seems to be on the verge of solving grid scale storage.
How often do you think it would need to supply a whole state? Australian states are massive.
I’m in NSW, and from memory, I can think of a few power outages that took down a few tens of thousands of homes for a few days. Most are much smaller. That’s in a state with a couple of million homes. So at most a few percent of the state. So even in a worst case scenario maybe you still get a day at full power. If you ration it out to essential services, then a lot longer.
This is all ignoring the fact that most outages are grid related, not generation related, which means that nuclear would be of no help, but a somewhat distributed battery backup system could be massively useful.
Now to the word “emerging”
This was built entirely in 16 months, from groundbreaking to connection to the grid. For the cost of a single nuclear reactor you can build 30 of these. And opposed to nuclear technology batteries are still making remarkable progress in their affordability.
Edit: Btw the battery also uses below 0,5% of the area of a usual nuclear plant.
Ah, yes, the good ol’ “force plants to close way before the end of their design lifetime due to anti-nuclear hysteria, and then use that truncated amortization as an excuse to dishonestly claim they were too expensive” argument. Works every time!
Maybe you should look the mentioned case up before making your argument.
Greifswald had 6 blocks in 1990: 4 blocks which were in very bad state, cracks in the pressure chamber with a high probability to release nuclear material into the environment. Due to these faults they were already shut down since 1987, except block 1 which was run against the recommendations of the security agency. To continue running them they would have to be rebuilt, completely. This includes dismantling them which as we now know would have taken many decades! Block 5 and 6 were under construction. (Started in 1970, planned for 1980) But mistakes were made during the construction, postponing it till 1990, when finally no energy company at all wanted to take over the risk of running it.
So Greifswald was shut down. Not to spite you, but because both security of the general population and financial aspects didn’t allow running it anymore. (It had already two near disasters which where kept hidden and only became known because of the fall of the DDR)
I don’t agree with @grue’s at all, but I think we can still agree that Greifswald appears to be an outlier in that it was especially badly built and managed. This fuckup of a plant is probably not indicative of every other plant.
On the one hand, yes it is. On the other hand the general average also does not seem good.
There are many reactors which had similar, but not as bad histories. Kozloduy NPP (BG), Zion Nuclear Power Station (US), Ignalina (LI), Shoreham, Bohunice, Superphénix, … While reactors which have run without noteworthy problems make up not even half of the total, which is far below anything which should be the norm for public infrastructure.
Lets take Germany as example, which fits quite well due to half of the countries having very lax requirements (DDR) and half having strict ones (West-Germany)
In fact during looking this up I haven’t found a single reactor which ran a significant time without any incident, even if I do not count construction issues which were caught and fixed in time before they resulted in incidents.
Tbf, steam explosions, turbine and transformator fires aren’t exclusive to NPPs. Just nobody cares if these events happen in any other thermal power plant.
The incidents exclusive to NPPs are those where (potentially) radioactive substances are emitted into the environment.
First there is a reason for that, as all major incident and even many minor incidents (see above) release radioactivity. Often into the environment in very minor cases only into the reactor building and the workers.
Secondly its wrong. Yes incidents do happen in normal plant too. But any remotely major ones also make it into the news. Actually they do it more often as the plants are not as remote and as huge that you wouldn’t notice them. As you can see 4 incidents haven’t been made public in Grundmemmingen B, I don’t know of a single one which has not been disclosed for years with coal/gas plants.
Lets pick a random sample of 10 German coal & gas plants from the Wikipedia list: (Kraftwerk Bremen-Mittelsbüren[49]Gemeinschaftskraftwerk Bremen (GKB)[52]Industriekraftwerk Bremerhaven[1]Industriekraftwerk Breuberg[53]Egger Kraftwerk Brilon[1]Kraftwerk Burghausen[1]Industriekraftwerk Marl[1][2]Kraftwerk Clauen[1]Heizkraftwerk Cottbus[55][2]GTKW Darmstadt[57] )
We have 8 with no incidents at all, notable Bremen-Mittelsbüren which runs since 1964! Special mention also for Marl where the plant didn’t have issues, but the chemical factories around it, oh boy!
We have 2 with Issues, a complete list:
So in total you have less issues than with a single average atomic reactor and only 20% of the list had issues. Why is that so? First these systems are simple. The only contain comparatively few parts, you can access almost everything for inspection without special gear and notice and fix any faults before they even have a chance to become a problem. Secondly they deal with lower extremes. The steam circuit has less pressure, the power for the transformers is lower.
This also hold for the huge ones, e.g. the 4 Datteln plants where only Datteln 4 had a major fire incident with no deaths. The oldest one running 1964-2014, longer than any atomic reactor in Germany.
When you look to wind turbines incidents are even more rare. We have currently about 28600 wind turbines in Germany, of these 129 had incidents like damage to the blades. 8 towers collapsed so 0.5% with issues and 0.02% with major ones. (And these issues concentrate on the first turbines built)