In 2010, Nick Clegg made a fateful intervention against nuclear power. On the eve of becoming deputy prime minister, the then-Lib Dem claimed that building new reactors would take too long: they wouldn’t “come on stream” until about 2021 or 2022. Fast-forward to the autumn of 2022, and Clegg’s remarks were being ridiculed as evidence of Britain’s myopic governing class. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had sent the cost of imported electricity through the roof — a problem that hasn’t gone away, and could soon spark outages right across the country. There is now a growing consensus that Clegg’s stance was not just wrong, but irresponsible. Given its potential to provide large volumes of clean, reliable electricity, nuclear is an obvious answer to Britain’s problem of energy security.
Yet Clegg’s critics never seem to mention the other arguments he made against nuclear energy: that new reactors tend to suffer from spiralling costs, and that “no one has got a workable answer to the dilemma of what you do with nuclear waste.” This points to a contradiction amid the new pro-nuclear fervour. While supporters castigate the British state for being negligent, slow, wasteful, and generally incompetent in its energy strategy, they also demand that this same state commit to a technology that requires high levels of competence over a long period of time. The rewards could be great, but the stakes are high, and our institutions hardly inspire confidence.
That the UK needs to drastically improve its energy situation is beyond doubt. Like many in the anti-nuclear camp, Clegg insisted that wind, solar and tidal power were the UK’s best path to energy independence. That is not exactly how things panned out. While Britain has enthusiastically cut down its production of fossil fuel energy, renewables have yet to fill the gap: electricity imports remain at a record high. It should be noted that a strategy based on renewables actually strengthens the case for nuclear. Not only are reactors low-carbon, they also generate electricity continuously, crucial when our weather can be so capricious.
Meanwhile, demand for electricity is growing rapidly. The government estimates that it will be 50% higher by 2035, not least because decarbonising the economy means switching to electricity wherever possible. According to MIT, it takes 800 wind turbines, or 8.5 million solar panels, to match the energy output of an average nuclear reactor.
Little wonder, then, that recent years have seen renewed interest in nuclear power. After decades in the environmental wilderness, climate conferences are now signing countries up to a goal of tripling the planet’s nuclear capacity. Ministers are listening: over 60 nuclear reactors are currently under construction worldwide. That’s especially true in China, which really does take energy independence seriously, and plans to build no fewer than 90 over the next decade. Russia, for its part, wants 30 new reactors by 2050. Beijing and Moscow are both exporting their nuclear programmes to other countries, with the latter building reactors across Eurasia and striking deals in Africa. As for the United States, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Ken Griffin and Peter Thiel are among the big-name investors who now have a stake in nuclear.
Much of the hype is focused on new technology. Some reactors use “pebbles” filled with coated uranium particles instead of the traditional rods. Evidence from China suggests that this can avert meltdowns like the 2011 Fukushima disaster. In Jiangsu and Texas, meanwhile, new reactors won’t just make electricity, but also provide factories with heat energy. But the greatest excitement surrounds Small Modular Reactors. As the name suggests, SMRs aim to alleviate the biggest obstacles to nuclear power: massive upfront costs and long construction times. Though they will produce about a third of the electricity of an average reactor, optimists think they could one day be assembled in two years at a cost of around $1 billion each.
What about Britain? Alas, there are more serious hurdles than the short-termism demonstrated by Clegg. Nuclear power has, after all, enjoyed plenty of backers here, among them Tony Blair, George Osborne and Boris Johnson. At last year’s election, it was endorsed in the manifestos of both main parties. No matter. All but one of the country’s existing reactors will be retired by the end of this decade. Somerset’s Hinkley Point C, started in 2016, was meant to be finished next year. Instead the government is still looking for investors to cover the mounting costs of the project, which is now due in 2031. And when the reactor does eventually start producing electricity, it won’t be cheap — likely double the current wholesale price. At the same time, Keir Starmer is also struggling to drum up private backing for a new reactor, Sizewell C in Suffolk. The site was declared suitable in 2009 but is still awaiting an investment decision.
More evidence, in other words, that Britain specialises in very expensive infrastructure, so long as it doesn’t have to be built efficiently or indeed even finished. Nuclear projects have suffered from the usual problems of government dithering and wrangling with private partners. Interminable planning complications hardly help either. EDF, the French state-owned energy company, grumbles that British planners have demanded over 7,000 modifications to its reactor at Hinkley Point C, even though the design is already operational in France and Finland. The lethargy is self-perpetuating: time and cost overruns in one project make politicians more nervous about committing to the next, while hard-won skills and resources disappear before they can be used again.
Given the climate of bureaucratic paralysis and political inertia which has settled over Britain, it is difficult to imagine the state capitalising on any breakthroughs in nuclear technology. Indeed, as Andrew Orlowski points out, the government has managed the impressive feat of deliberately ruling out the most plausible candidate from its SMR competition — because the design was too advanced and therefore didn’t require support. The winner, naturally, will not be announced until 2029.
But as the authority of the British state continues to be sapped by its own dysfunction, it’s possible that a nuclear revolution will come, just from a different direction. A major reason for the renewed interest in nuclear power is the rise of AI, a technology with an enormous appetite for energy. The data centres underpinning AI software require vast amounts of electricity for processing and industrial air conditioning; a ChatGPT enquiry uses 10 times more electricity than a Google search. According to Bloomberg, the demand from data centres is outpacing electricity supply around the world; in London and southeast England, it is already squeezing the grid capacity needed to build new houses. By 2027, AI could consume as much electricity as Argentina; by 2030, more than India. These power supplies need to be constant, so renewables aren’t appropriate.
The upshot is that America’s big tech companies are suddenly poised to become patrons of nuclear energy. The US has had its own problems with building reactors in recent years, but given the wealth and political influence that Silicon Valley can bring to bear, this may well change. Already, Microsoft and Amazon have struck deals to buy electricity from existing nuclear plants. These companies, along with Google and others, are also pouring money into SMR development, together with investment firms like BlackRock and the Department of Energy. Some of these small reactors could be supplying electricity by the end of the decade.
In technology, as in politics, we are at an uncertain juncture, and artificial intelligence and SMRs may yet prove overhyped. But it seems entirely plausible that, in the coming years, America’s state-backed tech firms will be looking to export a new model of nuclear-powered AI infrastructure. It also seems plausible that a future British government, desperate for alternatives to a bankrupt and discredited state, will welcome the offer with open arms. This could resemble the situation in a country like Nigeria, where an unreliable grid means that data centres generate their own electricity. Or it could be the beginning of a new phase of privatisation, where involvement in the energy system allows corporate interests to extend their power into the very foundations of the state. In a precedent of sorts, Javier Milei, Argentina’s libertarian President, recently invited American investors to sponsor SMR-powered data centres in his own crisis-ravaged country.
Yet for all the putative benefits, from energy security to decarbonisation, the recent outbreak of pro-nuclear sentiment carries a strong element of herd mentality. It has emerged in part from a fantasy discourse about rebuilding Western civilisation through vague ideas like state capacity, industrial policy and “abundance” — altogether suggesting a nostalgia for the high modernist spirit of the post-war boom. Now it’s also caught up with the tech industry’s messianic drive to develop AI. Such mass optimism can obscure the very real risks that still attend nuclear energy, even if new reactor designs are less likely to melt down.
As case in point, consider one of the most terrifying and strangely overlooked places in Britain. Sellafield, on the Cumbrian coast, is Europe’s largest nuclear waste dump. The site of the world’s first major commercial nuclear plant, which came online in 1956, it now stores thousands of tons of radioactive waste, some of it imported from other European countries. According to the Guardian, Sellafield is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Many of its storage facilities are aging, improvised and crumbling, with one silo leaking 2,000 litres of contaminated water each day. It has admitted to a number of dangerous cyber-security lapses. Maintaining, repairing and expanding this site is very expensive — over £2.7 billion annually — while the cost of eventually decommissioning it and moving the waste underground is approaching £150 billion.
The substances we are struggling to contain at places like Sellafield will remain radioactive for thousands of years, long after the companies and political systems operating today have passed into history. The urgent question, then, is whether a state that barely has the competence to build nuclear reactors should be entrusted with handling still greater quantities of nuclear waste.
Wessie du Toit writes about culture, design and ideas. His Substack is The Pathos of Things.
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SubscribeThank you for this article. The fact that our technocratic elites, governments and health authorities are prohibiting people from properly laying their dead to rest marks our civilization, in historical context, as outright barbarians. (With apologies to those nations we now know from recent studies of the early Middle Ages were in fact highly developed in their own right.) Even during the 1665 bubonic plague of London, while the “plague pits” (mass graves) were being dug, a priest was required to be present to bless the dead. It wasn’t by any means a full and proper memorial service, but it was more than we’re being allowed today, thanks to exaggerated, unscientific fears about COVID. This is a travesty, an obscenity. John Ralston Saul, author of Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (a must-read), wrote nearly 30 years ago of our technocratic elites: “The technocrats of our day make the old aristocratic leaders seem profound and civilized by comparison. …by any standard comprehensible within the tradition of Western civilization, (they are) virtually illiterate. One of the reasons that (they are) unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and (they have) little knowledge of (their) own civilization.”
Secularization has deeply impoverished Western Culture. The disenchantment and displacement or trivialization of the canon by science & tech has bereft us of our rich trove of symbol. The resultant inability to read metaphoric and symbolic expression has left us with an inability to address otherwise ineffable meanings such as death.
This article has opened my eyes to the significance of the days from late October to mid November. I hadn’t made the connection between Remembrance Sunday and All Saints’ and All Souls’ (Halloween). There’s also the natural backdrop you didn’t mention: most foliage is visibly dying around us as we head into the dead – or ‘sleeping’ – season of winter. Almost certainly there are more ancient memories of festivals that commemorate the annual round of nature. Fire-lighting for the dead could be a fag-end of this, as is Bonfire Night.
Years ago I attended a Samhain (Halloween) outdoor pagan ceremony where the priestess talked about the veil between the worlds being thing and our being close to those who had gone before. The next morning,. November 1 I attended a C of E service where the priest said the same words. This time of year always has this “vibe” however you clothe it. The old “Bonfire Nights” of my youth before the resurgence of Halloween had the same energy. Penny for the Guy used to go door to door; now – trick or treat. And with the strong growth of neo paganism we have explicit ceremonies for the dead and the ancestors. Dumb Feasts are increasingly popular (where you set a table place for a departed one and put out some food or drink that was their favourite.) The Dia De Los Muertos has never been stronger in South America. And of course this period ends with Remebrance Day. So of course all the energies of death are connected with now before the light returns at yule tide and we celebrate Christmas. As for this time of year – Yeats said it best:
” A ghost may come;
For it is a ghost’s right,
His element is so fine
Being sharpened by his death,
To drink from the wine-breath
While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.”
This is the most thought provoking piece I have read in some time. Thank you. Growing up in the suburbs of west London in the late 1940s and early 50s, I never heard of Hallow’een. Even as late as the 1960s as a teenager I never knew of it. When I discovered it I thought it was an American money making import, which perhaps in its present style it is. But nonetheless having read this piece, at least we can see that in its iconography it rekindles aspects of the original content. It is fascinating to hear that it was banned during the Reformation and yet still existed in pockets in the UK. It seems that all ceremonies we have are simply additions to or bolted on to the most elemental and primeval myths and that most of those originated as markers and pauses between the seasons. It makes sense to celebrate the dead when the leaves are falling, and it makes sense that when a branch of Christianity banned that we were able to simply take November the fifth and still keep our bonfires. The additional ritual we are blessed with now is Remembrance Day which fits in with the same autumnal passage. I have also been reading Burke (“Reflections on the Revolution in France”) where he speaks of our lives and culture being a fusion of the dead, the living and the unborn. These ideas and this knowledge of where we fit in to the movement of life has never been more important given the cultural morass in which large numbers of intellectuals and intelligent people would prefer to tear the fabric of our world asunder and start, as it were from year zero: to start as though nothing had gone before and as though the dead had bequeathed us nothing and that we had nothing to bequeath those as yet unborn.
I was a little surprised at the alleged disappearance of All Souls’ commemoration having attended a sung requiem for the souls of the dead in our C of E church last night (All Souls’ Eve). We had of course celebrated All Saints in the morning.
I think it a pity, though, in these days of both foreign terrorism and disparagement of parliament by the current Ottoman-Mogul regime, that people no longer celebrate the foiling of the Gunpowder Treason.
I would take issue with the statement that “Britain doesn’t today have the kinds of widespread customs which are still common in Catholic countries, such as visiting churchyards to bring flowers or light candles on the graves of loved ones. “
It may be true in England, but in non-conformist and now secular Wales, the day for honouring the Dead and visiting cemeteries with flowers is Palm Sunday. You will find cemeteries in Wales bright with daffodils, celebrating Spring and eternal life.
As one of a small Catholic community when I was growing up in West Wales, we marked All Saints and All Souls with candles and Masses for the Dead , but the flowers were for Palm Sunday with everybody else.
Strangely ‘bonfire night’ on the 5th is missed here. Guy Fawkes was a later addition. It is all part of the same turn of the year pagan solar year grouping predating Christianity. I am sure that the communication with the departed is ancient too.
It’s good to encounter the Clerk of Oxford in a different setting.
Medieval people lived with death very close at hand. Loved ones generally died at home under the care of an extended family who were also involved in preparing the body for burial. Death was a constant companion and people feared it, held it in awe and learnt its lessons.
We are shielded from death. Today it is dealt with by doctor, hospital,hospice, the police and funeral director. It has been said that the Victorians were obsessed with death and refused to talk about sex. We however are obsessed with sex and refuse to talk about death. In fact we try to ignore it or minimise it. We surround it with sentimentality and presumptious beliefs and refuse to learn its lessons.
As a parish priest I took many funerals and witnessed a gradual sentimentalisation of death. Princess Diana’s funeral was a game changer in this regard. It accelerated the trend to want “personal” funerals with an emphasis on the loved one’s life which often ended up making them sound like saints. There was sometimes an attempt to downplay the reality and challenge of death and to marginalise God. Incredibly at Diana’s funeral He was mentioned 3times and Jesus once. The Resurrection was mentioned once and neither God the Father nor His Son were mentioned in the 3 hymns, nor in the Reading. The rest of the service was centred in Diana.
We have also surrounded death with presumptious beliefs which have no basis in the Christian Faith. Basically it is asserted that when everyone dies they will go straight to Heaven. There isn’t even the very questionable belief in a purgatorial interlude in which we are made fit to stand before the holy God.
Of course everyone has the right to believe what they want, but it is presumptious in the extreme to call it Christian unless it adheres to the body of Christian doctrine which has its roots in the Bible, our final authority.
Basically the Christian belief is that our eternal destiny depends on our response to Jesus Christ. Do we believe in Him or not? Do we have a relationship with Him through faith,prayer and worship believing that He died for our sins that we could have eternal life. This relationship is open to everyone. It’s a wonderful,transforming experience in this life and gives great assurance for the next. When death comes the Christian believer will go straight to be with Christ in spirit. When Jesus returns at the end of time all will be raised to life, believer and unbeliever. There will then be the Judgement at which the eternal destiny of each person will be settled. There is no second chance, no purgatory. This is the most important lesson death can teach us.
As far as our relationship with the dead are concerned I believe the Church of England has got it right. We should commend everyone to the love and mercy of God realising at the same time that there is no point in praying for them in any long term way because for them the die is cast. As a society we should learn once again to hold death in awe and not sentimentalise it. We should certainly hear what it is saying to us about our mortality and vulnerability, judgement, repentance and faith in Jesus Christ and the possibility of Eternal Life.
Fascinating, thank you. Chimes with the shortened days and loss of foliage.
Thank you for this much needed essay on the importance of connecting with those who came before us and offering gratitude. I also feel this is a very important time of year to reflect and connect, and the pagan rituals mean a lot to me as we mark time and try to find meaning in our lives.
These ceremonies are truly beautiful and I’m committed to holding on and reviving them since our modern holidays mean very little to me, and in fact often seem like nothing more than opportunities to promote capitalism and controlling attitudes about politics and religion.
Thomas Jefferson considered one of his greatest achievement the defeat and removal of the entail from Virginia law. The Feast of All Hallows, as Ms Parker indicates, entailed obligations as well as devotion to ancestors. Contrary to modernism, it recognized the continuum of human being; that we are each obligated to pay their debts and to preserve and perpetuate their gifts. The rejection of that ‘entail’, it’s impossible to miss in these times, is become comprehensively catastrophic. A contemporary Dante would find Locke & Knox and their epigone, Jefferson & Hamilton, in the ninth circle.