When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.

If you’ve been told “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, you have been a victim of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable.

This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream or potential future tech such as nuclear fusion, thorium reactors or breeder reactors.

Compared to nuclear, renewables are:

• Cheaper
• As clean or cleaner, in terms of emissions
• Faster to provision
• Less environmentally damaging
• Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
• Decentralised
• Much, much safer
• Much easier to maintain
• More reliable
• Much more capable of being scaled down on demand to meet changes in energy demands

Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. But at present, while I’m all in favour of keeping the ones we have until the end of their useful life, building new nuclear power stations is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.

Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on building nuclear power plants should be spent on renewables instead.

Frequently asked questions:

• But it’s not always sunny or windy, how can we deal with that?

While a given spot in your country is going to have periods where it’s not sunny or rainy, with a mixture of energy distribution (modern interconnectors can transmit 800kV or more over 800km or more with less than 3% loss) non-electrical storage such as pumped storage, and diversified renewable sources, this problem is completely mitigated - we can generate wind, solar or hydro power over 2,000km away from where it is consumed for cheaper than we could generate nuclear electricity 20km away.

• Don’t renewables take up too much space?

The United States has enough land paved over for parking spaces to have 8 spaces per car - 5% of the land. If just 10% of that space was used to generate solar electricity - a mere 0.5% - that would generate enough solar power to provide electricity to the entire country. By comparison, around 50% of the land is agricultural. The amount of land used by renewable sources is not a real problem, it’s an argument used by the very wealthy pro-nuclear lobby to justify the huge amounts of funding that they currently receive.

• Isn’t Nuclear power cleaner than renewables?

No, they’re pretty comparable in terms of emissions, and renewables are cleaner in terms of other environmental impacts. You can look up total lifetime emissions for nuclear vs. renewables - this is the aggregated and equalised emissions caused per kWh for each energy source. It takes into account the energy used to extract raw materials, build the power plant, operate the plant, maintenance, the fuels needed to sustain it, the transport needed to service it, and so on. These numbers generally show that renewables tend to be as clean or cleaner in terms of total lifetime emissions, and in addition, since nuclear relies on fuel extraction (mining) and has lots of issues regarding waste, renewables is overall cleaner than nuclear.

• We need a baseline load, though, and that can only be nuclear or fossil fuels.

Not according to industry experts - the majority of studies show that a 100% renewable source of energy across all industries for all needs - electricity, heating, transport, and industry - is completely possible with current technology and is economically viable. If you disagree, don’t argue with me, take it up with the IEC. Here’s a Wikipedia article that you can use as a baseline for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy

Contracts being awarded means that they can start planning construction. Building a pilot plant will still take several years, if everything goes very well. Then you need to commission and test the new system. That again will take a number of years in the best of circumstances. Then, if everything goes very well, you can start thinking about getting series production going. Which has never been done before for a technology like this so it’s again going to take a long time. You’re looking at several decades in the best case scenario for those things to make any kind of meaningful impact on world energy generation. Which is why anybody touting SMRs as a solution to climate change is either clueless, delusional or lying.