Paris Fails to Revive the Nuclear Dream

In Paris, in early December, the advocates of nuclear power made yet another appeal to world leaders to adopt their technology as central to saving the planet from dangerous climate change.

Yet analysis of the plans of 195 governments that signed up to the Paris Agreement, each with their own individual schemes on how to reduce national carbon emissions, show that nearly all of them exclude nuclear power.

Only a few big players – China, Russia, India, South Korea and the United Kingdom – still want an extensive programme of new–build reactors.

To try to understand why this is so the US-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asked eight experts in the field to look at the future of nuclear power in the context of climate change.

One believed that large-scale new-build nuclear power “could and should” be used to combat climate change, and another thought nuclear could play a role, although a small one.  The rest thought new nuclear stations were too expensive, too slow to construct and had too many inherent disadvantages to compete with renewables.
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Hui Zhang, physicist and senior research associate, Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs:
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Can China increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to 15 percent by 2020 and 20 percent by 2030?  If China arrives at a cap on total energy consumption of 4.8 billion tons of coal equivalent by 2020 (an increase from 4.26 billion in 2014) as the government plans, then the projected hydro power, non-hydro renewable resources (wind, solar and other renewable energy), and nuclear power would account for about 7 percent, 5 percent, and 3 percent of total energy use, respectively, which would make achieving the target feasible.

While a fleet of nuclear reactors with 130 GWe by 2030 would represent a substantial expansion (over four times the current China’s capacity of 30 GWe and more than the current US capacity of about 100 GWe), it would account for only 5 percent of total energy use in the country and would constitute just one quarter of the non-fossil energy needed.  In practice, the total energy use will likely be higher than the planned cap, so the share of nuclear power in the overall energy mix would be even less.  Eventually, nuclear power is important if China is to address concerns about air pollution and climate change, but it is only one piece of a huge puzzle.

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