Nuclear is now too late to lead the Green Transition

Nuclear power is a technology that, for good reasons, provokes a lot of strong and emotional positions. Once said to be the future of energy production and the herald of the, definitely hyperbolic and perhaps even mistakenly attributed, prediction that it would lead to energy becoming “too cheap to meter”, its history has ended up being one of public suspicion over safety and waste as well as a track record of under-delivery and cost overruns.

Some of our energy experts in the Common Weal Energy Group are in The National today highlighting another aspect of nuclear power that pushes back against the current argument in the UK for expansion on the grounds of meeting climate targets - it is not just more expensive now than renewable alternatives but too slow to meet the now looming deadline of the climate emergency.

The article points out that a typical nuclear plant takes a global average of 17 years to plan, build and bring to generation whereas a typical grid-scale wind or solar farm takes only two to five years from planning to operation and rooftop solar projects can be installed in as little as six months.

This rate of installation is important not just in terms of absolute power generation but it is critical in terms of displacement of fossil fuels and the pollution they create. The IPCC has been clear that even as the world now looks as if it has already failed to meet the 1.5C climate change target every single fraction of a degree matters in terms of damage averted. This means that a tonne of fossil fuel pollution averted today matters more for the globe than a tonne of pollution averted in 17 years time.

This in turn means that even if it took the same amount of time to roll out a Gigawatt of renewable energy than it does to roll out a Gigawatt of nuclear energy, the fact is that the renewables start displacing fossil fuels from the moment the first wind turbine is erected while the nuclear plant has to wait until everything comes online all at once. This means that over the increasingly short time that we have left to pull fossil fuels from the energy sector more climate change damage can be averted with renewables than with nuclear.

The counter arguments to this line of thought are relatively thin. Arguments that nuclear can be built faster if safety regulations are relaxed are unlikely to win public favour, and arguments over relaxing planning guidelines to, for example, allow nuclear plants to be built closer to homes face a similar barrier. Other planning fast-track plans that aren’t so controversial may also apply to renewables too so are less an argument in favour of fast nuclear construction but of fast energy construction in general.

New technologies such as ‘small modular reactors’ may make nuclear construction a little easier but this technology is still unproven at scale and even the UK Government admits that it won’t close the gap with the pace of renewables, with the UK’s first SMR not scheduled to start delivering energy to the grid until the “mid-2030s” at the earliest.

Scotland and the UK lack the manufacturing capability of fully transitioning our energy sector regardless of whether it’s done through renewables or nuclear and that has been the result of a series of misguided but deliberate political choices over decades. Both routes, but particularly renewables, are likely to be highly dependent now on importing materials especially from China.

However, as we pointed out in another recent article in The National, once it’s done we will have a clear 25 year timeline ahead of us to build up that manufacturing sector so that we can recycle those wind turbines, solar panels and batteries when they reach end of life and to manufacture new ones domestically for our own use.

Nuclear power may well remain an important part of a diversified energy grid in the future and may well play a significant role in parts of the world that do not have the same massive potential for renewable energy sites that Scotland does, but our energy experts have been clear - the consequence of past political choices now mean that the only route to decarbonising our energy grid ahead of climate emergency deadlines isn’t through nuclear power but through the mass rollout of renewables as well as other energy saving measures that we outline in our Common Home Plan. Everything else is a distraction at best, and a deliberate attempt to undermine those goals at worst.