When it comes to ESG, a policy that encourages and even forces companies and government entities to make economic decisions based on environmental, social, and governance factors, it is time we used the “nuclear option.”
Despite the supposed urgency of moving the world away from fossil fuels, ESG advocates have arrived at a surprisingly uncritical consensus about what constitutes “renewable” or “clean” energy. Solar and wind power receive the most emphasis but are too unreliable to power entire electric grids. Even cleaner fuels such as processed hydrogen require significant electricity to produce. Hydropower amounts to little more than a controversial footnote due to its limited geographic practicality and its potential impact on local habitats.
Which brings us to nuclear power.
The basic promise of nuclear energy was unlimited, cheap energy. In the 1970s and 1980s, countries around the world began building nuclear reactors. Many of those reactors are still active today. Yet nuclear power rarely enters the conversation about greenhouse gas emissions and renewable energy.
This is remarkable and, frankly, inexcusable.
Nuclear power may not be a silver bullet, but it’s close. We can generate tremendous amounts of energy with small quantities of raw material. Unlike wind and solar, nuclear power does not depend on the weather or the time of day. It does not require huge advances and investment in battery technology or extremely costly long-distance transmission lines from solar fields or wind farms to metro areas.
Developing nuclear power will strengthen the economic position of Western countries. Many of the most disruptive governments in the world, from Russia to countries in the Middle East to Latin America, largely subsist on extracting fossil fuel resources and selling them to the rest of the world. Should the demand for those resources decline significantly, those countries would receive far less money to engage in malign activities. They would also have far less leverage with Western countries.
The only major shortcoming is the problem of governments mishandling the technology. There is the danger of rogue or hostile governments or even terrorist organizations gaining the ability to manufacture and use a nuclear bomb. But even in more peaceful countries, there may be a high risk of inadequate design, maintenance, and safety protocols in the running of nuclear power plants.
Yet the dangers or downsides of nuclear power have been vastly overstated. Very few deaths have been traced to three well-known nuclear power plant failures: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. There was gross mismanagement and poor safety practices at Chernobyl. The fallout from Three Mile Island was quite limited. And Fukushima resulted from a massive natural disaster for which they had not accounted.
While there is no way to plan for everything, good procedures can significantly reduce the likelihood of an incident and mitigate potential fallout.
Further, we should not use zero problems, zero risk, or even zero deaths as our baseline. Many people die in the production and use of solar, wind, and fossil fuel energy production. If anything, nuclear appears to be the safest relative to power output.
Another concern regarding nuclear — how to store radioactive waste — simply requires better education and political will. Yucca Mountain, a nuclear waste repository in Nevada, can work well as a large long-term storage facility, and in a country as big as the United States, we could likely create alternatives. Even more important, though, are technological advances to reuse spent fuel and to store it more effectively on-site.
China, India, the U.S., and most of Europe are the largest nuclear powers and account for more than 60% of global CO2 emissions. If these countries shifted to nuclear energy, global emissions would certainly decline.
They say the devil is in the details. Building nuclear power plants is complicated and costly. We must have good safety guidelines and procedures. Yet these problems have been solved before in more than a dozen countries.
Nuclear power has waned because hostile regulatory agencies have made it incredibly expensive to build new plants due to the frankly unmerited alarmism on the part of many environmentalists about the dangers of nuclear.
But the other reason is the misguided faith in solar and wind power. Let’s send solar panels and wind turbines to countries in which the governments can’t be trusted with enriched uranium and nuclear reactors.
Meanwhile, in developed Western countries, let’s abandon the failed ESG approach and turn to a better, more readily available form of clean energy. Let’s go nuclear on it.
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Paul Mueller is a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.
