The Nuclear Non-Solution
Modernity suffers from a slow failure of energy production. Fossil fuel extraction faces mounting difficulties as we run out of sweet spots and as we burn through the easy-to-get part of oil natural gas and coal. (And we haven’t even mentioned their effect on the climate.) “Renewables” — which are anything but renewable — on the other hand, have failed to provide an alternative for a number of reasons. Instead, they kept us firmly locked-in in the existing — and now failing — fossil fuel paradigm. So can nuclear energy provide an alternative? Can our way of life and high-tech civilization be saved by a massive deployment of nuclear reactors? The answer in short is a resounding no, but let’s not get ahead ourselves just yet. Let’s see the reasons why atomic energy cannot substitute for fossil fuels, and why it cannot possibly halt the environmental, social and economic decline underway. It’s high time for a reality check.
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Baking bread in an electric kettle
The first major problem with nuclear is that the type of energy produced is just not right. I know it hurts, but from a technical perspective the current crop of nuclear reactors are nothing but giant water boilers. Heavy, cumbersome, intricately complex, expensive kettles, providing steam for a steam engine, not a new magical form of energy. This statement is equally true for traditional pressurized water, molten salt, modular and even fusion reactors. Their primary form of energy output is heat, which is then turned into steam spinning turbines and generating electricity. That’s all to it.
Nuclear reactors provide low to medium heat only, which is OK if you want to use it to generate electricity or to make pulp for paper production, but not nearly enough to maintain a complex technologically advanced civilization. None of the current or proposed reactors (1) can produce the high heat needed to turn iron ore into steel, sand into molten glass, or limestone, clay and fly ash into cement. Without these materials, on the other hand, it would be impossible to build modern roads, bridges, dams, tunnels, high rise buildings and yes, new nuclear reactors. Believing that nuclear can somehow magically replace coal and natural gas in these essential high heat applications anytime soon is like thinking we could bake bread in an electric kettle. (I mean you can try, but then don’t tell me that you failed.)
Advocates of nuclear energy tend to forget how utterly dependent this civilization is on the wide-scale availability of cheap fossil fuels. The amount of heat energy provided every day by carbon rich fuels is multiples greater than all of the energy the grid delivers in the form of electricity. As of today fossil fuels still generate 82% of all the energy consumed (mostly in the form of high heat) with only a fraction of that heat being turned into electric power. The share of electricity in final energy consumption, on the other hand, remains a mere 20%. And while it’s technically possible to use nuclear energy in Hydrogen electrolysis (a proposed replacement fuel for those high heat applications) the low end-to-end energy return on investment prohibits H2's use in a relevant scale. Converting electricity to hydrogen eats up as much as half of the energy invested, while compression, piping and storage also comes with their associated losses. Hence the lack of evidence for a “hydrogen economy” emerging, despite the fact that it was proposed more than thirty years ago already.
Energy is not just heat or electricity, though, it includes motion, too. Oil is still heavily used for that purpose in transportation, heavy machinery (excavators, dumpers etc.), agriculture and mining. Due to their high energy density, simple storage requirements, and the low weight of the overall system, petroleum products have proved to be unbeatable so far in all of these applications. So while it’s true that one unit of Uranium-235 holds ten thousand times more energy than oil, the fuel together with the reactor vessel, radiation shielding and the supporting cooling mechanism weigh much-much more than a diesel engine and a simple fuel tank. (Yes, even when it comes to small modular reactors… There is no way you can cram those under the hood of a truck.)
Dumper trucks carrying hundreds of tons of ores from a mining pit or combined harvesters gathering in crops at a speed of multiple acres per hour simply cannot be converted to use nuclear power. Even if we managed to scale up electricity production to match the power demand of the world’s diesel engines, the weight and cost of the batteries (not to mention the complex and incredibly wasteful hydrogen fuel cycle) would ruin the usefulness of these machines entirely. In order to overcome this “problem” we would thus need to find a way to make synthetic fuels from electricity in large quantities at a cost comparable to crude oil production and refinement. At current costs, however, (at two to five hundred dollars a barrel), it is inconceivable for synthetic fuels to replace regular diesel and gas anytime soon (2).
We need a lot, fast!
The coming decline in fossil fuel production creates an urgency beyond measure (3). Once the current extraction plateau dips into a permanent decline later this decade (or by the early 2030’s latest), oil production will fall rather dramatically. Independent research and energy intelligence company Rystad estimates that the output of oil wells will most likely be halved by the middle of this century. However, if we consider the increase in the energy spent on extracting crude from ever trickier locations, the net energy delivered to society might fall to less than a third of what we have today by 2050. Since natural gas comes mostly as associated gas (i.e.: extracted together with oil in most places) this coming fall in crude oil output will almost certainly mean a peak and decline in natural gas production, too, not to mention coal mining and delivery, which also depends heavily on diesel fuel.
The amount of energy derived from fossil fuels is orders of magnitude greater than the electricity output of all nuclear reactors in the world. The primary energy from carbon rich fuels amounted to 140 thousand Terawatts in 2023, while nuclear power plants produced 2602 Terawatts of electricity. Even if nuclear somehow managed to create both the high heat (above a thousand degrees Celsius to replace coal and natural gas) as well as synthetic fuels to replace oil at a competitive price, we would still need to scale these solutions up at a breakneck speed. And we are talking about a couple of years, not decades. Even if we calculated with a modest 3% annual decline in fossil fuel production after 2030 we would still need to install 4200 TWh of nuclear energy (or 161% of today’s figure) every single year (4).
Translated into number of reactors, this means adding 710 units every single year, on top of the existing fleet of 440 reactors. Based on the actual speed of nuclear build-out, this figure seems impossible to reach, though. According to the World Nuclear Association currently there are only 65 reactors under construction across the world (most of them in Asia), with 90 further reactors planned to be built. New plants coming online in recent years, however, have largely been replacements for retired reactors: over the past 20 years, 106 units were retired as 102 started operation. At this speed, we are going nowhere. A hundred units completed in twenty years equates to five reactors built in a year, necessitating a hundredfold increase in building activity across the globe to give us at least a fighting chance combating the coming decline in fossil fuel output.
Call me skeptical, but I don’t think that level of nuclear deployment is even remotely possible, with or without small modular reactors (SMRs). Not even in China, which, as you might have already guessed, is already well ahead in the development of the newest wonder-weapons of energy production. Their Linglong One SMR will be the first of its kind, and with plans of 10 new reactors to be built per a year, they will be surpassing the United States’ total nuclear capacity by 2030. While that might look impressive, installed nuclear power generation capacity is projected to grow to somewhere between 514 GW and 950 GW by 2050 globally, compared to the 372 GW we had in 2023. The reason: SMRs have a much lower electrical output per unit (5 to 300 MW per module vs gigawatts produced by regular nuclear power plants), therefore adding a lot of units doesn’t change existing trends dramatically. If Rystad’s projections of oil output decline prove to be correct, even the best case scenario would leave us with far-far less energy added than what’s needed to make up for the energy lost from fossil fuel sources. (578 GW of electricity added from nuclear versus the 70,000 GW of primary energy lost from fossil fuels by 2050.)
Solving nothing
It makes no sense to list all the other drawbacks of nuclear at this point. The gap in scale between fossil fuels and nuclear is so big, that even if we had all the Uranium fuel in the Universe, it would be extremely difficult to replace a fossil fuel infrastructure with an entirely new one built around nuclear energy in such a short period of time. Even if we knew how to safely provide high heat from nuclear, or knew how to make synthetic fuels at scale, we would still need a hitherto unprecedented mobilization of resources. Building nuclear power plants takes a lot of time, money, skilled labor, dedicated machinery, raw materials and energy.
In reality, none of the above is given. Uranium resources are limited by the amount of energy needed to get them. As I explained here, we have only a very little amount of high grade easy to mine Uranium left, and billions of tons of low grade hard and costly to extract uranium dispersed across the surface of the planet. As of today we still have no working reactors producing heat well above a 1000°C neither, and there are no plans to build one anytime soon. Synthetic fuels are extremely energy intensive to make and thus are unlikely to become cheap enough to enable the continued operation of six continent supply chains. It’s not a matter of scale, but physics: it takes a lot of energy to separate hydrogen and carbon from oxygen, then to react them to form artificial fuels. Synfuels come at a massive net loss when talking about energy invested versus the energy returned to the economy. Reinvesting these net energy negative fuels into the mining of not only uranium but copper, iron ore or chromium (all needed to build the next generation of reactors) makes these new power plants’ return on investment rather questionable. Declining ore grades (or the metal content of these minerals) makes the matter even worse, as an exponential increase in the energy demand of mining will eventually ruin even the best ROI calculations over the long haul.
The state of our infrastructure is another obstacle to the expansion of nuclear power. The electric grid, which currently wastes as much as 59% of the electricity fed into it, requires upgrades in the tune of $2.5 trillion by 2035 in the US alone. Needless to say, there is no way this can be done profitably. Instead, new power plants are built close to large consumers of electricity (for example: data centers) where skipping grid connection altogether is a boon rather than a disadvantage. If this trend continues, which given the state of the grid and the cost of an overhaul seems increasingly likely, islands of stable electric supply will emerge in an ocean of inconsistency, fluctuating power and frequent blackouts.
Energy is a key pillar supporting every civilization, but not the only one. Social stability and cohesion, economic equality, a benevolent leadership class — just to name a few — are all essential in continuing with civilization, especially when talking about a hitherto unprecedented mobilization of resources and preventing collapse. None of this is the case, though. Social cohesion is breaking down in the western world as we speak. Democracy has been already degenerated into oligarchy, threatening what remains of the West with a slide into anarcho-capitalism. With debt levels are shooting through the roof, the real economy stagnating and the financial world teetering at the edge of chaos what are the odds of a nuclear renaissance coming to fruition?
Or what about Earth’s carrying capacity and ecological overshoot? What about the more-than-human world? Nuclear won’t stop the ecocide, deforestation, over-fishing and the sixth mass extinction, nor chemical and genetic pollution (herbicides, pesticides, PFAS, micro-plastics, novel entities etc.). In fact, it would only exacerbate these issues by giving a boost to the economy, and raising its own (rather radioactive) waste stream to a whole new level, not to mention the risk that such high levels of nuclear deployment will mostly likely lead to the proliferation of the most deadliest weapons to date.
So, when do we stop thinking in “solutions”? When will we stop bargaining with reality and accept that the polycrisis we have found ourselves in was in the making for centuries now, and we are at just the beginning of its crescendo? Every single bit of this civilization — and all others preceding it — is and always was wholly unsustainable; and thus will not be sustained... With or without nuclear power. Every society before ours collapsed as they went through their own individual lifecycle from discovering a resource in abundance (pristine land, minerals and as of late fossil fuels) to exploiting it and eventually ending up in overshoot. Ours is no different. Accepting this simple fact and giving up on trying to save that which is beyond salvation does not mean giving up on life, though. Quite to the contrary: it liberates the mind from its endless struggles trying to change what cannot be changed, and allows one to focus on what can be done despite the multitude of difficulties ahead.
Until next time,
B
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Notes:
(1) Currently the highest temperature demonstration units are within the range of 750 °C and 950°C outlet temperature, which is a far cry from the temperature range (above 1500°C) needed to produce steel , cement or glass. All of these materials are essential in building these reactors and cannot be replaced with something else. Without adequate quantities of coal and natural gas, rebuilding these reactors (let alone maintaining civilization) will eventually become impossible.
(2) High fuel prices kill the economy, as we have seen throughout the past years’ natural gas and oil crises. Cheap energy is essential to every economic activity. Once the oil price goes beyond what productive economies can compensate (which is rather low), businesses go bankrupt in droves, nations go heavily into debt and deindustrialization begins; just take a look at the aftermath of the 2022 price hike. No wonder: no (cheap) energy, no economy. This is why I always have to laugh when I hear that oil prices will hit $200 a barrel, providing an incentive to find a replacement. Such high prices would simply slay the entire productive economy in a couple of months time, forcing nations to ration fuel with priority given to agricultural and military uses. Then, as the entire productive economy goes bankrupt and the financial system collapses, governments around the world would nationalize key industries and would start to ration food and every product imaginable. With that said, I don’t think that we will ever reach such high price levels. Instead the economy will slowly wither on the wine as one company after the other goes bankrupt and demand gets destroyed before we could ever see $200/barrel prices.
(4) Sure, we have more than enough in reserves to go for another forty, fifty or more years, but as the energy return on investment of new wells and mines keep deteriorating, and as the world economy becomes unable to finance ever more sophisticated extraction technologies, increasing mining and drilling activity will not cut it. Like it or not — believe it or not — and no matter what we do, coal, oil and gas production is plateauing as we speak, and their global production can be expected to decline in less than five years. This is entirely due to geological and economic reasons, none of which are negotiable or amenable to technofix solutions. Perhaps paradoxically, it was exactly the use of technology which has brought us to this point. As drilling techniques became more “advanced” they required ever more material and energy use per unit of oil recovered. And as we drilled through all the sweet spots and giant oil reserves, more and more wells had to be added to maintain at least a stable plateau of production from ever smaller pockets of oil. Therefore, thanks to our ingenuity, the material and energy needed to lift a barrel of oil grew exponentially — doubling every decade or so — slowly making it impossible to finance further exploration from normal economic activity.
(4) In addition to nuclear we would also need to build out a synthetic fuel production capacity at a same rate. Calculating with a 50% efficiency of turning electricity into synfuels (which is rather generous), we would actually need to double the amount of reactors built for this purpose.
