A recent post on this website discussed some of the upsides and potential drawbacks of relying on renewable energy technologies to fuel a global energy transition.  While both wind and solar likely have a substantial role to play in the world’s energy mix, another energy source has been having somewhat of a renaissance in recent times.  

Grace Stanke – Nuclear Engineer/Miss America 2023

For over half of a century, nuclear power has generated carbon free baseload energy around the globe as a major part of the energy production in many industrialized countries.  Today, it makes up close to 10 percent of electricity generation around the world.  Despite its long track record of success in generating carbon free electricity, words like nuclear power and uranium bring to mind very different things for different people.  And the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 gave detractors of this form of energy production another talking point to dissuade public policy makers away from nuclear power.

Source: Statista.com (2022)

While nuclear energy has always shown a lot of promise, it brings a bad taste to many peoples mouths, and for understandable reasons.  For one, it’s hard for many to completely disassociate nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.  While these are two very separate things, it makes sense that some people still have this fear as they both come from processing uranium.  The process for producing nuclear power is quite different from that of nuclear weapons, and happens to be the safest baseload energy source. Out of available energy sources, only solar power (not a baseload power source) has less, with both coming in with infinitesimally small deaths per megawatt hour rate.  While nuclear meltdowns have happened, the toll of human lives has been miniscule compared to other forms of energy production.

Source:  Our World in Data

There is also the pesky question of what to do with nuclear waste, which is a pretty nasty material.  This question has more or less been solved by proper storage methods, but it still remains on the list of many naysayers.  As long as existing regulations around storing and transporting nuclear waste remain in place, there’s no need to fear it.

But perhaps the most daunting hurdle for a true nuclear renaissance is the sheer costs that are historically associated with nuclear power plant construction. Building and maintaining nuclear power plants has a regulatory framework that proves almost unfathomably stringent, and cost overruns have been par for the course in the past.  Finding a commercially viable way to expand nuclear power will likely rely on the burgeoning small modular reactor (SMR) industry.  

The promise of SMR’s is the potential of building most of the components necessary in an automated factory setting, using the same schematics and process to construct many iterations of the same reactor, thus drastically reducing costs. But this industry is still in its infancy, and is still somewhat unproven both technologically as well as commercially 

Nuclear power still has an uncertain path forward in both the near and long term outlook. China has been quite active in its buildout of new reactors, France has continued its high level of nuclear power use, while various other countries have started eyeing nuclear power as a means to meet higher energy demands while still paying lip service to green initiatives.  If any countries or companies are able to unlock a path towards economically feasible rollouts of expanded nuclear energy, the projected energy demands across the globe could be met with the only source of carbon free energy that can be around the clock in any geography for baseload power.