M.V. Ramana at Literary Hub: I am scared about how fast climate change is disrupting our world. At a theoretical level, I have known for decades about growing carbon dioxide emissions and resultant changes to global and local temperatures, sea-level rise, severe storms, wildfires, and so on. But it was not till 2012, when Hurricane Sandy hit the northeast of the United States, that I was directly impacted. The power of that storm was immense, but I knew—theoretically, of course—that people elsewhere had experienced far worse storms.
More recently—in August 2023, as I was finishing this book—it was the turn of wildfires. As the McDougall Creek wildfire came closer to the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus in Kelowna, students and staff were asked to evacuate. My daughter Shruti is a student there. Because it was summer, she was at home in the Vancouver campus of UBC, where I teach. Had the fires occurred just two weeks later, I would have definitely been panicking.
I can go on for much longer in this vein. But there isn’t any need. Just about anyone alive today has been impacted in some way by climate change. Others have written at length about how the climate crisis is intensifying by the year, and one can stock a small library with published books about the myriad risks flowing from climate change. The library would be even larger if one included literature on the other related multiple cascading ecological crises we are confronting.
As someone trained in physics, and as an academic paid to research, I have been drawn to studying one essential contributor to these crises: how energy and electricity are produced, especially those methods proposed to mitigate climate change. Prominent among these proposals is nuclear energy.
Although climate change scares me, I am even more scared of a future with more nuclear plants. Increasing how much energy is produced with nuclear reactors would greatly exacerbate the risk of severe accidents like the one at Chernobyl, expand how much of our environment is contaminated with radioactive wastes that remain hazardous for millennia, and last but not least, make catastrophic nuclear war more likely.
Some might argue that these risks are the price we must pay to counter the threat of climate change. I disagree, but even if one were to adopt this position, my research shows that nuclear energy is just not a feasible solution to climate change.
A nuclear power plant is a really expensive way to produce electricity. And nuclear energy simply cannot be scaled fast enough to match the rate at which the world needs to lower carbon emissions to stay under 1.5 degrees Celsius, or even 2 degrees.
Cost and the slow rate of deployment largely explain why the share of global electricity produced by nuclear reactors has been steadily declining, from around 16.9 percent in 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was signed, to 9.2 percent in 2022. In contrast, as the costs of wind and solar energy declined dramatically, and modern renewables (which do not include large dams) went from supplying 1.2 percent of the world’s electricity in 1997 to 14.4 percent in 2022.
Another contrast is revealing. When pro-nuclear advocates talk about solving climate change with nuclear energy, they call for building lots and lots of reactors. The World Nuclear Association, for example, proposes building thousands of nuclear reactors, which would together be capable of generating a million megawatts of electricity, by 2050. Such a goal is completely at odds with historical rates of building nuclear reactors.
More here.
