22.08.2024

Nature’s gift to humanity?

It is neither particularly expensive nor particularly dangerous. Using nuclear energy is, though, essential if we are to enjoy a life of abundance and nature is to have room to flourish, claims Emil Jacobs

In the last issue of the Weekly Worker, Jack Conrad argues against a set of commonly proposed ‘solutions’ for dealing with climate change.¹ It is unclear what it is that he does want, and the piece is riddled with problems. In this reply I will focus on his arguments against nuclear energy in particular, but first I will put forward my reasons why it is impossible to ignore the nuclear option if we are serious about our goal to cut carbon emissions.

Humanity as a whole uses a dazzling amount of energy. In 2023 this was a total of 183,000 terawatt-hours (TWh)² - an amount that has been growing by around 2% a year.³ If we project this into the future, it means energy usage will have doubled by around 2060.

A strong current on the far left is that of ‘degrowth’, which, apart from arguing for run-of-the-mill socialist policies like public transport and housing for all, is hard to pin down as a single monolithic and coherent ideology. But there appears to be a common theme: energy usage. Some degrowthers want to cut energy consumption by up to 95%!⁴

And there is a case to be made. That 183,000 TWh is all the energy we generate, also called primary energy. 76.5% of this primary energy is generated by burning fossil fuels. Most of this energy is lost as heat. So you can argue that primary energy will drop significantly, once we electrify many things, mainly in industry, as electricity has the potential to be vastly more efficient than burning fossil fuels.

To a degree it is a two-way street: hydrogen and e-fuels, needed for hard-to-electrify sectors like long-distance flights, need energy to be made, and suffer a big overall loss from creation to consumption - 30% efficiency for hydrogen, at best.⁵ In the end, we are not quite sure what decarbonised energy consumption actually looks like for the amount we need, as many factors play a role. These factors are constantly shifting: eg, will we still want industry x, y or z by 2050? These are crucial political questions that need answering.

Then there is the crucial question of Africa: how will it develop? If we take China as a model of what to expect, the outlook is somewhat grim. China went through its industrial development during the last half of the 20th century, using primarily coal to fuel its industries. Africa has the same option, given the vast coal reserves mainly in South Africa and the low price of coal on the world market. This degrowth position then actually means that Africa cannot be allowed to develop in the same cheap way. Social imperialism in a new jacket.

Without energy, and all the possibilities it brings (mainly industry and most use-values in a modern society - smartphones, fridges, freezers, public transportation networks …), there can be no development. Put stronger: there is no such thing as a low-energy, rich society anywhere on the globe.

Vaclav Smil offers something more tangible for us materialists, in what he calls the “four pillars of society”⁶: without cement, steel, fertiliser and plastic, the world would be a very different place. Yet these four ingredients of modern life are responsible for consuming 17% of global energy and producing about 25% of all emissions. Are we to deny cement, steel, fertiliser and plastic to Africa? What about other energy-intensive products, like glass, paper, chemicals, etc?

This is the crux of what we need to solve: we need clean energy, and lots of it, for a thriving society. This is both the case under capitalism and under socialism. Although we might be able to cut some industries and industrial processes utilising a socialist form of development, degrowth alone can hardly solve the climate crisis without complicating African development and cutting living standards significantly. Degrowthers are therefore wrong.

Band aids

Renewable energy is often touted as the way forward to a zero-carbon future. However, many of the objections Jack makes against a “techno-fix” apply to it.

First, despite him saying that solar and wind are a lot cheaper than nuclear energy, that is not correct. They are only cheaper from the perspective of an investor. Let me explain. One way to rationalise costs is to calculate the levelised costs of energy, or LCOE. This is simply the costs divided by all the energy the respective energy source is going to produce over its lifetime.

Investment consultancy Lazard publishes updated LCOE numbers every year and for many years these numbers have been used by enthusiasts of renewable energy to prove that their wonderboy energy source is really cheapest. There is a catch, however.

In the latest LCOE report by Lazard the firming costs are included for the first time: “Firming costs reflect the additional capacity needed to supplement the net capacity of the renewable resource ...”⁷ In other words, what do solar and wind cost, if we assume that society needs energy all day long, instead of only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing?

In that case, Lazard puts solar at between $126 and $141 per MWh, and wind at $115 to $132 per MWh, both for the Californian grid. Meanwhile, nuclear is put at $141 per MWh. This latter price is completely based on the rather expensive Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors that just came online in Georgia. So, if we include firming costs - which can be achieved by various technologies, but most often by natural gas plants - renewables and nuclear are at least in the same ballpark.

The point here is that LCOE in itself is a problematic figure, as it only looks at the cost of putting up a wind turbine or solar park. The rest - infrastructure, firming costs, decommissioning - is externalised. These costs are not small. In the case of the Netherlands, which has plans to put up 70 GW in wind turbines in the North Sea by 2050, we are talking about €1 billion per GW in infrastructure.

Due to the intermittent and decentral nature of solar and wind energy, a vast investment into the grid is also needed. For the Netherlands this is going to be €160 billion for the next 10 years,⁸ and in the UK it will be £58 billion.⁹ All these costs are going to be carried by the consumer or taxpayer - mainly working class households, of course.

Meanwhile, grids where nuclear is dominant tend to be a lot cheaper per kWh consumer prices compared to grids where renewables are dominant. For example, household prices in Germany (a country that phased out nuclear completely) are double that of France (which relies heavily on nuclear).¹⁰

Second, intermittency is actually a big problem. No factory in the world, including those making solar panels, runs on solar or wind energy. The best you get are so called ‘certificates of origin’, which is really just playing with numbers.¹¹ Factory machinery needs electricity constantly. A minor hiccup of mere milliseconds can be enough to shut it down, or even cause damage, with costs potentially soaring into the millions. Of course, you can run a gas plant next to it, but that is not a carbon-neutral solution and costs a lot to keep on standby. No wonder Germany is deindustrialising.¹² No industrial society can run on solar and wind alone without a reliable way of storing the energy generated.

Third, resources. Solar and wind are low-intensity energy sources. So you need a lot of wind turbines and solar panels for a given amount of energy. For example, in the Netherlands there are around 3,000 wind turbines on land which generated 13.6 TWh in electricity in 2022.¹³ This is slightly more than half the electricity Hinkley Point C in Somerset will generate, once it is completed.

Suffice to say that you need far less resources for nuclear energy compared to solar and wind.¹⁴ After 20 to 30 years you will need to replace solar panels and wind turbines, for example. These can partly be recycled, but mining will be a necessity for a long time to come (mines, of course, are mostly located in the third world, where labour conditions are abysmal).

Nuclear energy has another trick up its sleeve: breeder reactors. In our capitalist market these reactors are still a niche, since there is plenty of cheap uranium, but they sport several huge advantages. For one, they eat the nuclear waste. Jack mentions the 24,000-years half-life of plutonium-239, but this is fuel waiting to be used, which could provide Europe with all its energy for many centuries¹⁵. No more mining needed and the actual waste left - so-called fission products, remaining radiotoxic for a mere 300 years - are tiny in volume and are easily managed. A far cry from the toxic mining tailings for solar panels that remain toxic and carcinogenic forever.

Fourth, quantity. This is not going to be a problem everywhere, but in many industrialised places, solar and wind simply do not deliver enough energy. Since I am most familiar with the Netherlands, I will once again use it as an example. Currently we use around 830 TWh (or 3,000 PJ if you want to put it that way) in total energy. As noted earlier, the government is aiming for 70 GW of wind energy in the North Sea and wants to electrify many things, so total energy consumption will drop to somewhere around 700 TWh. Assuming capacity factors are normal for offshore wind, these plans will deliver around 275 TWh in electricity annually. Basic arithmetic is enough to figure out that there is going to be a problem here, as we are missing a lot of clean energy in this picture. The options are: import or nuclear.

There is one trump card that solar and wind enthusiasts can play against nuclear energy: it is faster to deploy. Agreed. This is why I think we ought to deploy many solar and wind farms - despite the enormous costs, resources needed and impact on the environment - to lower our carbon emissions as fast as possible. In the longer term, beyond 2050, we can focus on steadily building more nuclear power plants, gradually replacing old solar and wind farms, when their time comes.

Misguided

Let me move on to Jack’s arguments against nuclear energy. First he mentions how building a nuclear power plant produces a “hell of a lot” of greenhouse gas emissions. True, but then they can run for 80 years or more. A better way to look at this is by lifecycle analysis. ‘Our World in Data’ has a handy chart,¹⁶ based on numbers from the United Nations among others, putting nuclear energy firmly at the bottom of the chart for greenhouse gas emissions.

It takes a long time, says Jack - true again. But I would argue that this is the wrong way of looking at it. What we need (and so far no western country has committed to this) is serialised build-outs, much like what France did in the 1980s with the Messmer Plan. You start building one unit, the following year you start building another, then the next year another … You do not stop the commencement of new builds. The first decade you will not have any completed builds, but then … As if by magic, you get a nuclear plant every year!

The individual build time can be long, but is irrelevant. The point is about mass production. This incidentally lowers costs immensely, as you gain experience building them and can use an already established supply chain.

Decommissioning

The disposal of waste and decommissioning is a hidden cost, says Jack. Untrue. By law this cost is accounted for and part of the kWh price, being a fraction of a penny.¹⁷ The owner of the plant thereby saves up for the eventual decommissioning.

“Spent uranium, though it has a relatively short half-life, kills quickly because it releases lots of radiation.” I presume Jack is referring here to spent fuel with its fission products, which indeed are highly radioactive. We know this, and therefore we can handle it with the necessary care. These fission products need storage for around 300 years before they lose their radiotoxicity. We can do this, Jack.

“So why do various governments relentlessly pursue nuclear power?” Because, Jack, nuclear energy is the only scalable clean-power source that can deliver energy as we need it, is highly reliable, gives the option for geopolitical energy independence as you can store uranium for many years, has a tiny footprint, and delivers thousands of highly paid and secure jobs for local communities.

Nuclear energy has been nature’s gift to humanity. We either embrace this gift and set our species on a path to an abundant life for all, with room for nature to flourish, or we reject it - to our own peril.