Beautiful Nuclear

UN Sustainable Development Goals

The climate emergency is here — with millions of people living in coastal areas, if we don’t make drastic changes, we are talking about crises of migration, politics, and security. We need to find solutions now — as we did with vaccines during the pandemic."

Shauna Aminath, Cabinet Minister of Environment & Climate Change for the Maldives

Nuclear Energy FAQs

“According to Life Cycle Impact Analysis studies analyzed, the total impact on human health of both the radiological and non-radiological emissions from the nuclear energy chain are comparable with the human health impact from offshore wind energy."

— European Commission’s Joint Research Centre

Nuclear power has contributed more to simultaneously reducing global mortality and carbon emissions than any other energy source. In 2017, Kharecha and Hansen estimated that nuclear power has avoided 64 gigatons of CO₂-equivalent emissions from replacing coal since the beginning of civilian operation, saving 1.8 million lives.⁴⁵

Nuclear power could have saved significantly more lives, and prevented climate change, over the past four decades had early deployment rates and cost reductions continued. Unfortunately, disruption to the initial rates of new projects occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s. When the first reactor came online in 1954, experts predicted that nuclear power would emulate earlier energy transitions, like the switch from burning wood to coal, and then adding other fuels like oil and gas. It did not, however; the transition rate to nuclear power reached 4% by 1972, then stalled.

The learning curve model suggests a reduction in costs as experience is gained in an industry or technology. Put another way, the fractional reduction in cost per doubling of cumulative production capacity creates a cost-experience curve. Lang et al. examined this curve over the entire period of commercial nuclear power operation and found that the world forfeited substantial benefits as a result.⁴⁶

Before 1967, the learning curve allowed Overnight Construction Costs (OCC) to decrease as cumulative capacity increased. Had this trend continued, additional nuclear power could have substituted for 69,000 – 186,000 Terawatt-hours of coal and gas generation, sparing 9.5 million lives and avoiding 174 gigatons of carbon emissions. For perspective, global emissions of CO₂ are 36.2 gigatons per year as of 2018. This suggests that based on historical rates, nuclear power could have prevented annual global industrial emissions five times over.

If nuclear learning rates had continued, the price of electricity would have decreased, and more people would have access to clean electricity. The next decade will be critical for dramatically increasing clean energy generating capacity by applying innovative deployment models and lessons learned. To deploy enough nuclear power to meet the unprecedented demand for clean energy, we need to seize existing opportunities to reduce new plant costs, extend the lifetime of existing plants, and create political support for building new advanced heat source capacity.

This report considers nuclear power’s sustainability in detail with the latest scientific analysis and its findings on this topic, by the European Joint Research Centre.

“The analyses did not reveal any science-based evidence that nuclear energy does more harm to human health or to the environment than other electricity production technologies already included in the Taxonomy as activities supporting climate change mitigation.”⁴⁷

— European Commission’s Joint Research Centre

Figure 30⁴⁸ shows the relative safety and CO₂ emissions of different energy sources. Whenever combustion of fuels (coal, oil, gas, and biomass) is replaced with non- combustion, lives are saved and emissions decrease. But a strategy which aims
to replace nuclear power with a combination of renewable energy and natural gas for meeting demand on low production times, means emissions increase and lives are lost.

Figure 30. What are the safest & cleanest sources of energy?

Because of the scale at which it needs to be deployed, clean power infrastructure must have a minimal impact on its environment. It should not use too much physical space, nor should it have excessive adverse effects on ecosystems or humans. The current energy debate neglects the issues of scale and land area required for the full lifecycle of an energy source. Numbers expressed in hundreds of thousands of square kilometers are hard to visualize. Also, total land use depends on several complex factors.

Nuclear power has the smallest overall environmental footprint of any energy source. Nuclear uses roughly 50 to 500-times less space in total for energy production than wind and solar, and even less compared to bioenergy to produce the same amount of energy (Table 1).⁴⁹ This includes mining activities for raw materials, as well as waste management. Nuclear energy uses transmission several times more efficiently than renewables, uses less copper per MWh, and requires fewer rare earth minerals, which have recently been identified as constraints on large-scale renewables deployments. Nuclear power plants have the most rapid energy payback times. The difference in land use is significant, as the more space something takes, the more it can disrupt nearby people or natural systems, leading to potential conflicts and opposition. The less land (or sea) area used for energy production, the more natural land can remain pristine, or be set aside for other uses.

The severity of the impact of this land (or sea) use depends greatly on the location and technologies used. For example, a solar panel on a roof may have no direct impact, while a solar park spanning a large area displaces the local natural ecosystem. To achieve the scale required for a renewable energy led transition will require massive changes to land use with major cultural and biodiversity implications — and frequently the proposal is to impose this development on other people and ‘somewhere else’.

The enormous scale required for energy-diffuse renewables to substantially replace energy-dense fossil fuels is not just an increase in the number of gigawatts built but will be a qualitatively different set of impacts in terms of the number of people affected, and competition for land. These risks increase with the scale of deployment. Conflicts with ecological and food-production goals resulting in growing public opposition threaten renewables development at the necessary scale required for green hydrogen before they could ever be built. This public opposition to renewables development, even at low rates of deployment, is already in evidence across the U.S. and Europe.
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We make this argument not to discourage the deployment of renewables, but to encourage a fully informed understanding of the types of risks involved in any deployment strategy for decarbonization. As risks are never entirely avoidable, we need a range of technologies with complementary benefits and orthogonal risks, such that their risks are independent of each other where possible, to make up a safe, clean, stable, and diversified new energy infrastructure.

Nuclear is also our most materials-efficient energy source. It requires fewer bulk materials, like concrete, steel, copper, aluminum, or glass, than energy sources that collect diffuse energy flows like wind and solar. Because these are materials used in all construction, the relative increase in demand for them, even if we significantly ramp up power plant construction, will remain somewhat insignificant.

With regard to acidification, eutrophication, water eco-toxicity, ozone depletion and photochemical oxidants, the JRC found nuclear energy comparable to, or better than, solar PV and wind:

“Land occupation of nuclear energy generation is significantly smaller than wind or solar PV.”

— European Commission’s Joint Research Centre

Table 1. Environmental footprint & energy density of wind, solar, nuclear

"There is broad scientific and technical consensus that disposal of high-level, long-lived radioactive waste in deep geologic formations is, at the state of today’s knowledge, considered an appropriate and safe means of isolating it from the biosphere for very long time scales.”

— European Commission’s Joint Research Centre

Nuclear spent fuel can be stored on an interim basis at the same plant where it is produced. It can then be managed with the same level of care as the operations of the plant itself. Spent fuel is enclosed inside steel and concrete containers at secure storage facilities at nuclear power plant sites. They are fortified against extreme events like earthquakes and fires. See Figure 31 of people hugging spent fuel casks.⁵⁰

Figure 31. Paris Ortiz Wines, hugging spent fuel casks at Palo Verde, Arizona USA, 2019

In general, nuclear power stations release no harmful pollution into the surrounding environment unlike fossil or biofuels plants. There is no evidence that civilian nuclear spent fuel anywhere has caused any significant harm. Coal’s by-products are much more dangerous because coal releases its waste products directly into the air. By contrast, the nuclear industry has proven to be exemplary in its management of waste streams, with a high level of regulatory oversight. Sweden, Finland, and France are demonstrating practical long-term facilities that meet all the requirements for safe disposition of spent fuel.

So now, if asked: “what about the spent fuel?” — the answer is “there are demonstrated solutions.” Now it is time to turn our attention to waste streams from other energy sources that are today causing material harm to people and the environment — most damaging of all, the 8 million premature deaths caused by air pollution from fossil fuels. This is the waste we should be worried about.

Finland and Sweden are examples of effective waste management. Together, they have developed a geological repository system that will be safe (i.e., it will never cause significant harm to anyone) and will need no active monitoring. Finland has already started constructing a spent fuel repository, and Sweden is following closely behind. All it took was good research, solid engineering, and permission from local residents and government. Most countries struggle with developing and siting repositories due to public and political opposition. But, given its well-designed siting approach, local municipalities in Finland actually competed for the right to host the Onkalo repository.

"Onkalo is a game changer for the long-term sustainability of nuclear energy ... Finland has had the determination to move forward with the project and to bring it to fruition. Waste management has always been at the center of many debates about nuclear energy and the sustainability of nuclear activity around the world. Everybody knew of the idea of a geological repository for high-level radioactive nuclear waste, but Finland did it."

— Rafael Mariano Grossi, IAEA Director General

"With regard to potential radiological impacts on the environment and human health, analyses demonstrate that appropriate measures to prevent occurrence of potentially harmful impacts or mitigate their consequences can be implemented using existing technology at reasonable costs."

— European Commission’s Joint Research Centre

As seen in Figure 30, nuclear is among our safest sources of energy, including accidents and short- and long-term waste storage. The main hazard of nuclear power is linked to the radioactivity of its fuel, both used fuel and the whole fuel cycle, including mining and other activities. To gauge the overall risk of nuclear, let us examine the dangers of ionizing radiation overall, and what part of our daily radiation dose comes from civilian nuclear plants and their full fuel cycle.

The average dose a human gets is around 3 millisieverts (mSv) per year from all sources (Figure 32).⁵¹ Yet local doses of background radiation from natural sources, which can vary by one or even two orders of magnitude, show no statistical impact on human health. From this it is clear that the global average dose, or even ten-times that, poses little to no risk for human health. At annual doses of 100 mSv or more, some studies have found statistical impacts, but these are still much smaller than the impact of diets, such as preference for red meat vs. fish, for example. We make choices every day that affect the amount of radiation we receive more than what we would receive from anything related to a nuclear plant or spent fuel.

Figure 32. Sources of global radiation, average annual dose from all sources

"Provided that all industrial activities in the nuclear fuel cycle comply with regulatory frameworks and related Technical Screening Criteria, measures to control and prevent potentially harmful impacts on human health and the environment are in place to ensure very low impact."

— European Commission’s Joint Research Centre

After decades of careful studies, Finland is now constructing the first geological final repository called Onkalo, and the Swedish government has given the go-ahead for the Swedish final repository to follow suit. The safety analyses done by Posiva show that it has a safety margin of at least 1:1,000,000.⁵² That is, if the absolute worst case occurs such that both the copper and the bentonite clay surrounding a waste canister mysteriously disappears after just 1,000 years and a person lives her whole life on the land just above this most contaminated square meter, drinking only the groundwater from this spot, and eating only food grown there (none of this is actually possible; it was just an extreme modelling exercise), the maximum annual dose that person living 10,000 years from now could get is 0.00018 mSv. This is roughly equivalent to the dose of radiation one gets from eating two bananas, or from sleeping next to another person. Remarkably, both of these activities are associated with minuscule traces of radiation. Tweak even one of these unrealistic assumptions to be more realistic, and even the radiation equivalence of eating those bananas starts to disappear. The actual threshold for any noticeable health risk starts to appear statistically at around 100 mSv/year.

The total average radiation dose — background radiation plus radiation from various human activities (Figure 32) — is tiny compared to levels that might start to show as effects in public health statistics. How large a share does the nuclear sector represent of that total dose?

Figure 32 shows how much average radiation comes from the nuclear fuel cycle: less than 0.001% of the average total dose, which in turn is far less than a dose that would actually start to show a meaningful public health impact. It is so small that it fits within a rounding error, many times over. And this includes the whole cycle from mining uranium, transporting and enriching it, fuel fabrication, use in a reactor, intermittent storage for the spent fuel and after that, long-term storage and accidents. Now, one can ask whether this is something we should be very worried about when comparing it to the risk of failing to mitigate climate change in time and at the scale needed?

"The average annual exposure to a member of the public, due to effects attributable to nuclear energy based electricity production (including mining) is about 0.2 mSv, ten thousand times less than the average annual dose due to natural background radiation."

— European Commission’s Joint Research Centre

"Fatality rates characterizing state-of-the art Gen III NPPs are the lowest of all electricity generation technologies."

— European Commission’s Joint Research Centre

"Comparison of impacts of various electricity generation technologies on human health and the environment, based on recent Life Cycle Analyses, shows that impacts of nuclear energy are mostly comparable with hydropower and renewables, with regard to non-radiological effects."

— European Commission’s Joint Research Centre

Nuclear reactors have proven to be exceptionally safe sources of energy. Since they spread no pollution, have a high level of internal work-place safety culture, require very small amounts of fuel, and produce an even smaller amount of manageable waste, they have very few ways to harm people or the environment. One of those few ways is a nuclear accident of the worst kind: a core meltdown. How dangerous are these worst kinds of nuclear accidents? How have these contributed to fear of nuclear energy?

We have three real-life data points to assess the overall harm that nuclear core- meltdown accidents can cause. Three Mile Island (1979, partial core meltdown), Chernobyl (1986, a total meltdown and severe fire in a Soviet-designed reactor without a containment building) and Fukushima Daiichi (2011, a triple-meltdown taking place after roads and infrastructure turned to rubble due to an earthquake of such magnitude that it shifted the earth on its axis, slightly increasing the length of a day, causing a devastating tsunami which caused most of the damage).

In each of these cases the most significant harm to public health was caused not by radiation, but by fear of radiation, including the counter measures undertaken, and their long-term effects on health and mental health. Living in constant fear has a deleterious effect on human health, as research into the after-effects of both Chernobyl and Fukushima has demonstrated. Residents of Chernobyl and Fukushima had higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide than normal, even compared with the aftermath of other extreme events such as post-tsunami Japan. Public anxiety coupled with poor infrastructure and lack of economic opportunity make evacuees reluctant to return.⁵³

In 2006, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) reported: “The mental health impact of Chernobyl is the largest public health problem caused by the accident to date... Rates of depression doubled. Post-traumatic stress disorder was widespread, anxiety and alcoholism and suicidal thinking increased dramatically. People in the affected areas report negative assessments of their health and well-being, coupled with... belief in a shorter life expectancy. Life expectancy of the evacuees dropped from 65 to 58 years. Anxiety over the health effects of radiation shows no signs of diminishing and may evenbe spreading.”

"A decade after the Fukushima accident: Radiation-linked increases in cancer rates not expected to be seen."

— United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, March 2021

Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic are applicable to the nuclear sector:

"Everything in the COVID-19 pandemic is about trust. Innovation is needed in behavioral science on how we
as communities and individuals: understand epidemics and behave during them; process information and advice; build trust. That’s as scientific as building vaccines."

— Dr. Mike Ryan, World Health Organization

While wind, solar, and hydro do not use ‘fuel’ to produce electricity, nuclear does. Fuel-based technologies have an advantage when it comes to availability and reliability, as any energy source based on fuel can produce energy on demand, rather than when the weather allows it. Uranium can also be easily stockpiled as in the case of the U.S., and NPPs typically have fuel onsite to prevent disruption. Nuclear power is largely immune to fuel supply disruption and therefore contributes to energy security. Uranium has an advantage over other fuels. It has an energy density over 2 million-times higher, and a volumetric energy density over 35 million-times higher, than the best chemical fuels such as oil and anthracite coal. As a result, a relatively small amount of uranium must be mined every year.

Mining operations are hazardous, and the environmental impacts from uranium mining are comparable to most mineral mining. Due to the radioactivity of the ore and the daughter products present due to radioactive decay (radium, radon, etc.), mining regulations are augmented to attend to radioactivity. Helpfully, due to the small amounts of uranium needed to produce a given amount of energy, the amount of mining activities is small. Indeed, due to the high energy density of uranium, around half of global uranium is produced by in-situ leaching, a process that requires almost no disturbance to the soil and vegetation.⁵⁴

All mining activities, including uranium mining, should be subject to strong regulatory standards to limit the impacts on people and nature. The global nuclear industry today could go further by establishing a ‘fair-trade fuel’ standard that requires uranium mines to meet the highest social and environmental quality standards.

In many countries, existing spent fuel uranium stockpiles could be used as fuel in next generation reactors to run the country — without mining another scrap of uranium for more than a millennium.^55

‍Beyond mining, new technologies are being developed to enable uranium to be extracted from seawater. Nuclear fuel made with uranium extracted from seawater makes nuclear power completely renewable. It is not just that the 4 billion tons of uranium in seawater now would fuel a thousand 1,000-MW nuclear power plants for 100,000 years — it is that uranium extracted from seawater is replenished continuously, so nuclear becomes as endless as solar, hydro, and wind.⁵⁶

"Nuclear power’s singular environmental advantage can be summed up in the term ‘energy density’ — consider that a golf-ball-sized lump of uranium, weighing just 780 grammes, can deliver enough energy to cover all your lifetime use, including electricity, car driving, jet flights, and manufactured goods — a total of 6.4 million kWh.

To get the same energy output from coal would require 3,200 tons of black rock, a mass equivalent to 800 adult elephants and resulting in more than 11,000 tons of carbon dioxide. The volume of this pile of coal would be 4,000 cubic meters: you can imagine it as a cube 16 metrers in height, depth and width, about the size of a large 5-story building."

— Mark Lynas, Nuclear 2.0

Nuclear is beautiful because its tiny land use and lifecycle footprint protects nature and delivers civilization-scale, abundant clean energy. Both of these are fundamental to our future health, well-being and prosperity on this planet."

Kirsty Gogan, co-founder of Terra Praxis, report co-author

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See LucidCatalyst's Beautiful Nuclear report for references on this page. LucidCatalyst was commissioned to write this report with the collaboration of experts from various organizations.
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Terra Praxis endorses this report and is collaborating in its dissemination.

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Beautiful Nuclear

UN Sustainable Development Goals

#1

No Poverty

#2

Zero Hunger

#3

Good Health & Well-Being

#4

Quality Education

#5

Gender Equality

#6

Clean Water & Sanitation

#7

Affordable & Clean Energy

#8

Decent Work & Economic Growth

#9

Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure

#10

Reduced Inequalities

#11

Sustainable Cities & Communities

#12

Responsible Production & Consumption

#13

Climate Action

#14

Life Below Water

#15

Life on Land

#16

Peace, Justice & Strong Institutions

#17

Partnerships for the goals

Nuclear Energy FAQs

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