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.
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Subscribe” According to MIT, it takes 800 wind turbines, or 8.5 million solar panels, to match the energy output of an average nuclear reactor.”
Actually it will take “800 wind turbines, 8.5 million solar panels”… AND a £billion gas fired power plant as backup.
Net zero, the gift that keeps on taking.
I learned a few days ago that Canada has one of if not the largest uranium deposits on the planet, a commonwealth ally about to heave out of its leftist delusion and start living in reality again. Looks like an opportunity to me.
I expect better from Wessie du Toit, quite frankly. To conclude on this note here without mentioning the prospect of molten salt reactors (MSRs) is irresponsible.
MSRs are nuclear reactors that operate by having the fuel in molten salt form – eg in a Thorium MSR, it’s thorium fluoride at about 600ºC. These reactors are not yet built at utility scale but have been experimentally proven as far back as the 1950s. Their great advantage is that because the design requires the fuel to be molten, the danger of meltdown that characterises solid fuel rod designs is entirely eliminated.
The relevance here is not about whether we can solve our nuclear rollout challenges by resorting to the use of such designs: we probably could if we gave it an uninterrupted decade of money, research and a stable political climate, but that’s unlikely to happen.
The key point here is the capacity of MSR designs to utilise existing nuclear waste stockpiles. The high level waste is very dangerous in its existing solid fuel form: there is no known means of safely disposing of it and therefore it has to be stored indefinitely. However it can be converted into salts that can then safely undergo further fissile reactions in a MSR. How much energy we might get out of it is less important than the fact that a means exists of cleaning up a problem that otherwise costs us £150biillion and still might give us a major environmental disaster at some point. The waste products from an appropriately designed MSR are only dangerous on the scale of decades, not millennia. Not doing this is nuts.
There is even the prospect that if MSRs both succeed at cleaning up this waste and can generate significant energy, that £150billion liability might turn into a net positive asset.
We should be doing this instead of chucking money away on stupid wind farms.
Why the down-vote? This seems a very good solution.
It’s been obvious for 30 years (and people have been pointing it out for that length of time), that switching energy to electricity required at least a trebling of electricity production in order to absorb the energy requirements of space heating and transport.
It’s also been 100% obvious in that time period that solar and renewables do not deliver at the massive scale required, in the rapid timescale required. After 30 years we still only have about 30% of electricity (not all energy) from renewable sources, and only a portion of that is solar and wind. We’re also discovering that, instead of being the promised cheap electricity, it’s hugely more expensive than promised, requiring huge subsidies, complex financial contracts and guaranteed income – someone is making a fortune off this stuff.
In 30 years, if we’d prioritised nuclear power as a National Strategic Plan under Parliamentary prerogative, and thereby liberated the process from the onerous planning and environmental swamp, it would have been possible to build more rapidly, and therefore more cheaply, and in larger numbers. All that money spent on renewables would have gone towards cheap, abundant electricity – giving us low-cost energy to underpin the economy. Remember we knew this stuff 30 years ago, but instead environmental NGOs went for the low-tech answer, and worse, ended up forcing Germany to close its nuclear power plants, probably the biggest climate change crime ever (and they’re trying to force France to close their plants…).
We can still go nuclear. In 30 years, renewables only will be only marginally further ahead from now, as replacement and maintenance become a factor. And we would need all the renewables installed in the past 30 years, and then treble it, just to get to 100% electricity production at levels we have now. So instead, just go for large scale, mass production of nuclear power. If it’s really a climate emergency, then nuclear waste is a proven, manageable, relatively small-scale problem. And if it is an emergency, the thing to do it to build stuff you know works, not hope on some dream of a possible new technology in the future.
Most of the high level nuclear waste is spent fuel rods. They still contain about 98% of their energy. They are in fact a valuable source of energy, but it’s currently cheaper to buy newly mined uranium rather than reprocess the ‘spent’ rods.
France does recycle them and I believe Russia can too, but the UK closed it’s reprocessing capabilities at Sellafield (under Blair I believe).
The last source I would use for information about nuclear energy is the Guardian, or maybe Greta Thunberg and chums…
Yes, I laughed when I read “according to the Guardian.”
I was one peripherally involved in a proposed project to bury nuclear waste in deep wells in Caithness. My main memory was just how small the canisters of waste were, even with all their layers of protection. Hopefully there are better sources than the Guardian to help us assess just how serious the risks are. It could be that they are more political than physical.
I’m sure somebody can correct me, but I was once told that all the nuclear waste America has ever produced could just about fit inside Wembley Stadium. No idea if it’s true or not
Wouldn’t it ruin the pitch?
For the most part that’s true. It would be a question of mass and volume that somebody probably calculated at the time and compared to a calculated volume of Wembley Stadium. It might or might not still be true technically, but it’s true that a very small quantity of waste is produced. The primary hazard is from the plant site itself, the rooms and buildings that house the reactor, and the equipment used to maintain it. It all gets contaminated as well. There’s so little waste that the US Congress has dithered for decades constructing the ‘official’ waste disposal site and may never open it, but it hasn’t mattered because the quantities of waste are small enough to be stored on the plant site and transporting it on trucks or trains might actually present greater hazards than just burying the whole lot of it right there when the plant is decommissioned.
There are certain kinds of waste that are technically radioactive and produced in much larger quantities that do have to be monitored but it’s more because they’re chemically toxic in a way that they react with the atmosphere to create deadly poisons and less because of the radioactivity. See my other comment.
One thing that sort of persuaded me on the subject was Professor James Lovelock committing to allowing a ton of nuclear waste to be buried in his back garden.
He would have known of course that there was zero chance of actually being taken up on the offer, but he was a famous scientist of international repute who understood that he could not make such statements recklessly.
Probably because a scientist knows the actual science. There are many kinds of radioactive things and most of them are not all that dangerous. A cube of plutonium such as that used in nuclear weapons for example, is less immediately dangerous to hold in one’s hand than a lot of common household chemicals that we know not to handle. There are some things that are very dangerous in terms of maybe causing cancer years or decades later but few that will kill you immediately. There are rather a lot of chemical substances produced and used in various manufacturing processes that will kill a person a lot quicker and in much smaller amounts. My father was a chemist and worked at a plant for many years and was very serious about chemical safety procedures. He could run off dozens of substances much worse than 99% of nuclear waste that are produced and used by industry where a release could theoretically kill thousands of people in a few minutes. Compare the casualties from Chernobyl to the Bhopal disaster in India. Puts things in perspective.
Then again, there is always the off chance the professor was just plain mad as a hatter.
He wasn’t. One of the sanest, intelligent and most clear-eyed people of modern times.
People just don’t have a very good sense of the scale of things. They probably think of radioactive waste in quantities like the amount of coal that goes into a coal fired power plant or the massive amount of waste produced by other industries, then multiply that by the scary factor of radioactivity that has accompanied the use of nuclear weapons and the fear of nuclear annihilation. Coal fired power plants are, ironically, often a greater hazard than nuclear plants due to the tiny quantities of uranium impurities in the coal, which gets shot haphazardly out the smokestack into the atmosphere where soon falls to earth in quantities that release measurably more radiation than a nuclear plant at corresponding distances. I love the irony. Because of the fear of nuclear contamination, we’ve opened more power plants of a kind that produces more radioactive contamination outside the plant site. Follow that chain of logic to the end and you figure out that human beings have put more radioactive contamination into the environment because they’re afraid of radioactive contamination. Brilliant.
The actual reactor material is very dangerous, but it’s also very small and less dangerous the farther away it is, so it can be isolated fairly easily, and since the building housing the reactor is also somewhat contaminated, it makes sense to store it all together whenever the plant is decommissioned. Even the radioactivity of the plant itself is overstated. If human society somehow collapsed, even that wouldn’t really matter much in terms of other lifeforms. Witness the Chernobyl exclusion zone/wildlife preserve. I think everybody who panics about the ‘environmental effects’ of nuclear waste should have to go on a video tour of what the Chernobyl zone actually looks like today. The bottom line is that the amount of truly dangerous stuff is incredibly small and you have to be pretty close to it for it to be dangerous immediately. Compared to other forms of industrial waste, nuclear waste is for the most part much easier to contain and in much smaller quantities.
The anti-nuclear people are mostly ignorant of the actual science and the real scale of problems. I know because I have a parent who worked in the nuclear industry at one of the nation’s few enrichment facilities that produced fuel for nuclear reactors and they always had a lot of interesting tidbits about how stupid and ignorant of real science the environmentalists tended to be. They worked at one of the enrichment facilities that produced fuel for nuclear reactors. One of the things local environmental and NIMBY types liked to point at was the thousands of drums of ‘technically’ radioactive waste just sitting there at the plant site. Uranium out of the ground isn’t actually useful. It has to be refined and separated into the highly radioactive U235 that is used in fuel and the much less radioactive U238 that comprises most of the mass of mined uranium ore. Once the 235 is taken out, there’s a lot of useless U238 leftover. It’s pretty intimidating to see, as the drums are piled up as high as some of the buildings and have that scary radioactive logo on them. The catch is that as much as there is, it’s not actually all that dangerous, at least not in terms of radiation. It’s actually less radioactive than the input material since most of the U235 has been taken out. It doesn’t require much of anything beyond the drums themselves in terms of ‘containment’. It does have to be monitored, but not because of radiation. It’s because the stuff can react with air and make some pretty nasty chemicals that are very toxic with or without radiation. Of course that never gets mentioned by the the anti-nuclear activists, because what they’re really concerned about is having something scary looking to show the public and big intimidating numbers. Then they can go ‘see, see, look how much radioactive waste there is.’ In context, it’s really more like any other industrial toxic waste, and as much as there is, it’s tiddlywinks to the amount of plastic pollution or some of the old public landfills full of God only knows what. It’s a classic case of misplaced priorities based on bad information provided by people with ideological/political agendas.
At least things finally seem to be turning towards a more sensible outlook based on real numbers and real science. What’s sad is that’s only happening because of another more recent environmentalist panic, also overstated and even less controllable. As such, I’m not sure we should be celebrating the triumph of common sense and science over irrational fear just yet.
Thank you for this. Facts that should be much better known than they are.
The statement I always remember about nuclear waste was that wherever it was put would have to safely contain it for two ice ages. I don’t think that is quite true but nevertheless it does bring it home how long a time that is, even if it isn’t very large in volume.
In the US, the standard is 10,000 years. An added premise is that, once stored, no response to an extremely low probability event (such as an earthquake in a formation that has been geologically stable for millions of years) will ever be possible. In addition, President Obama deferred to Senator Reid of Nevada who, for personal political reasons, opposed the Yucca Mountain site in his state as a storage facility. Therefore, Yucca Mountain sits abandoned and the waste is stored in pools adjacent to the reactors that generate it. Nuts.
F*ck me, this is a depressing time to be British
It’ll be a lot more depressing after 2028. The generating squeeze between 2028 and 2030 caused by the decommissioning of all but one of our nuclear reactors has no mitigation in place. If we re-run tonight’s wind conditions and demand in 2028 (allowing for all planned new generation) the UK will be short of electrical power by a huge 2.5GW. Rationing (either by extreme surge pricing or actual rolling blackouts) is inevitable or else the grid will collapse. It is South Africa level incompetence.
I don’t know where you are getting your figures on generation equivalence: “it takes 800 wind turbines, or 8.5 million solar panels, to match the energy output of an average nuclear reactor” That’s way off mark, as simple arithmetic can show. The old Didcot traditional power station had 4 x 500 megawatt sets, a total of 2000 megawatts, 24x7x365, ignoring maintenance. Typical wind turbines are rated at 1 megawatt, which translates to 2000 turbines to equal Didcot . It’s far worse than that though, since wind load factor, the actual generated output averaged over one year, is never better than 10-13% of name plate rating. Assuming 10% for planning purposes, that equates to 20,000 wind turbines to equal just one traditional fossil fuelled power station.
Wishful thing won’t get the job done, and we will need to have much more honest and hardheaded approach to energy provision, a national security issue which should be given the highest priority.
So ridiculous numbers of windmills aren’t enough to match the output of nuclear reactors. That’s too weak, we need more power. We need a ludicrous amount of windmills.
“According to the Guardian, Sellafield is a catastrophe waiting to happen.”
So literally nothing to worry about then.
According to Sellafield the Guardian is a catastrophe that has already happened and continues to happen
Had we, years ago, gone down the thorium route along with India, we would be far better off. Not only does it present fewer problems with waste, but also a wider range of rare elements (for medicine and hi-tech etc) and in greater quantities. It is also far safer than uranium as it requires input energy and is therefore far easier to shut down in an emergency. Naturally, it would have cost a lot, as India has found, but the engineering and physics challenges are reducing all the time and any nation that ignores its potential is just plain foolish!
Thorium reactors can also make use of high level waste from Uranium reactors. Thorium itself is ‘fertile’ but not fissile, so the reaction can be kickstarted with some uranium waste (sic). There’s also about 3x more thorium than uranium so they can keep humanity going for centuries.
The future for nuclear is good, but with the low quality ‘elites’ we’re lumbered with I doubt the UK will be part of it.
“no one has got a workable answer to the dilemma of what you do with nuclear waste.” Nonsense. First of all it is not a “dilemma” which means a difficult choice between two alternatives. Neither is it a problem. Waste is sensible places is stored in vitrified condition and surrounded by concrete. Extremely safe. The high costs of nuclear are entirely avoidable as shown not only by earlier experience but also more recent experience in places like South Korea. But it requires reforming the insane regulations which just keep getting worse even as safety keeps improving. In the USA, we have the same regulatory problems.
When a person participating in the sport of kicking a can down the road – a British speciality it seems – meets a wall, both the can and the person stop. So, as this article has two points: we need nuclear, but we can’t do nuclear, how much further down the road is the wall?
Surely it’s only a matter of time before we start to employ some of Mr Musks technological ingenuity to get our nuclear waste safely in to space – then into the sun.
Nuclear has not been understood by those with political influence, for many years, probably because there are so few Engineers and Scientists with Whitehall and Westminster.
Nuclear Engineering, in fact, all Engineering, requires financial stability: canceling and restarting programmes, redefining project goals, and panicking about ‘Green Revelations’ has resulted in a dysfunctional industry, without any idea what is possible. The same could be said for many infrastructure projects.
LFTRs, by removing already radiated fuel from the reactor, can reduce the amount of very long lived, dangerous, radioactive isotopes.
It’s not that this statement is the answer to all our problems, it’s that most of those in influential positions within the political bubble have no understanding to follow the technical arguments involved in deciding what possibilities lay ahead.
Sir David A would complain about this attitude.
Why?
Most of the waste at Sellafield is less radioactive than Cornish granite. What should we do with the high-level waste? My vote would be to process it into weapons but it can also be used as fuel for fusion reactors.
I don’t remember where I read it (probably NYT araghh), but there was a time when some U.S. news outlets mocked the idea of China building nuclear plants in Africa, arguing that Africa’s abundant sunlight made solar power the obvious choice. However, this critique oversimplifies the situation and ignores several important factors relevant to nuclear energy.
While Africa has abundant sunlight, solar power is weather-dependent and inconsistent, making it less reliable as a sole energy source which speaks in volume for UK weather. Nuclear power, in contrast, provides stable, continuous electricity, essential for energy security and economic development. Solar farms also require significant land, which could become a limitation as urbanization and population growth accelerate not only Africa but even greater for such dense UK. Nuclear plants, being far more space-efficient, can generate vast amounts of energy while occupying a smaller footprint.
Nuclear energy is highly efficient, producing immense energy from minimal fuel, making it ideal for stable, large-scale power generation. It also creates skilled jobs in engineering, construction, and waste management while supporting industries reliant on stable electricity, such as AI and tech infrastructure. Beyond energy production, nuclear projects foster innovation and economic growth, contributing to a circular economy by repurposing waste by-products or using them in advanced reactor designs.
Similarly US is suffering from the severe ideological dependence of civilians and billionaire to respond to the public needs! Not to mention, Britain’s inertia and inefficiency in nuclear development which seems rooted not just in political challenges but also in a broader reliance on billionaires to address societal needs – this idea I think is reaching its demise. As long as this mindset persists, progress will remain slow. Additionally, Cold War-era boomers’ fears of nuclear war may still influence public and political attitudes. However, despite these concerns, it is difficult to ignore the clear benefits of nuclear energy and its significant opportunity for many other industries!
Nuclear energy doesn’t just address energy security and decarbonization; it supports industrial growth, technological advancement, and workforce development. Countries like China recognize this, which is why they invest heavily in nuclear alongside other energy sources. In the long term, nuclear power is about more than meeting immediate energy needs—it’s a critical investment in the future.
‘… 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….’
That’s rich. Olkiluoto was about 15 years late and vastly overbudget; Flamanville roughly ditto, and both closed down for modification/maintenance almost as soon as they were finally ‘operational’.
The EPR design of these, Hinkley and Sizewell C has been declared ‘too complex’ for further commissioning by, er, EDF, who are ruling out any more, anywhere.
The financing deals for Hinkley and SZC (if it gets one) are beyond ludicrous from the consumers’ point of view, and the UK govt won’t even reveal the VFM basis (ha ha ha) on which they have plunged a few £bn into SZC to keep alive the illusion that it will provide any affordable energy much before 2045.
And the magic SMRs that will supplant these lumbering cash-wasters are still grinding through ONR design certification schemes, not straining at the leash to start delivering anything but promises backed by government subsidy. No free lunches after 25 years of government inaction and timidity, alas.
Unfortunately, so true, and so predictable.
I’m sure it’s because Intelligence is believed to be a valid substitute for knowledge and experience, especially when it comes to STEM subjects, and an understanding of Business and Markets.
All true and yet tonight the UK is depending on power from Flamanville and other French reactors to prevent a blackout in the UK*. In that context, Flamanville and all of France’s expensive reactors are cheap at twice the price.
*French nuclear is delivering 3GW or 7% of all electricity needed in the UK right now. There is simply no reserve this large to cover the loss of French nuclear energy via the ICTs. Nor is there contingency to shed 3GW of UK load except by rolling blackouts. Such an event when it happens will cost hundreds of millions in lost economic output and destroy billions of future investment as we descend to third world electricity insecurity.
On the basis of my experience with ‘Copilot’, I do not feel that AI is worth the candle.