In daily parlance sustainability has become completely synonymous with ‘renewable’. On the Dutch wikipedia article on the topic it actually treats the two terms as one. It’s time we untangle this and appropriate the term for nuclear.
I’ll not make the case that nuclear is renewable. It is not. After all, it uses uranium that eventually ceases to exist, billions of years from now. This latter point also makes this moot, because as things stand it looks like the Sun will become too hot for multicellular life on Earth somewhere between 600 million and 1.5 billion years from now whereas nuclear fuel will last us at least three times as long. But fair, it isn’t renewable according to the definition.
I do want to make a case though that nuclear energy is sustainable. In fact, it is extremely so. Let’s look at the definition, by the 1987 UN Brundtland commission:
Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:
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the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and
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the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.
Or, as Hannah Ritchie puts it in her recent book Not the End of the world:
That definition has two halves. The first is making sure that everyone in the world today – the present generations – can live a good and healthy life. The second half is about making sure that we live in a way that doesn’t degrade the environment for future generations. We shouldn’t create environmental damage that takes the opportunity of a good and healthy life away from our great-great-grandchildren.
This dialectic is important as it tells us that you can’t be sustainable in a human sense if you only focus on the environment. This is a fools errand often made by those in the traditional environmental movement. This is for example the logic that leads us to the conclusion of Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb which says that the ‘ideal’ world population is around 1 billion, or Jane Goodall which a few years ago said this about it:
We cannot hide away from human population growth, because it underlies so many of the other problems. All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if the world was the size of the population that there was 500 years ago.
This was around 500 million at the time.
But, as Ritchie rightly states in her book, taking this serious would mean draconian levels of population control, perhaps killing off people on a level never seen before in human history by orders of magnitude. Only to result in a world population that’s in an impoverished state, which recreates the material conditions for widescale population growth…
But I digress.
Nuclear energy is sustainable exactly because it ticks both boxes of the Brundtland definition:
- It meets the needs of the present generation
- It doesn’t impact the needs for future generations
After all, the material impact for nuclear is tiny compared to all other low carbon energy sources (see UNECE 2022, page 56 figure 46). It further more has the lowest lifecycle CO2 emissions score (idem, figure 37) and it emits no air pollution, where fossil fuels are killing millions of people each year.
“Ah! But you neglect to mention nuclear waste!” Well, let’s talk about waste, in a broader sense. Because all energy sources have waste streams. In aformentioned UNECE report we see, again, that nuclear has one of the lowest impact in lifecycle human toxicity, only beaten by smaller hydro installations and wind (figure 41). If we look at the carcinogenic potential, figure 42, it is only beaten by smaller hydro installations.
Why is this? Let’s quote the report:
The main contributing substance is arsenic (in ionic form), emitted to surface and groundwater, from coal extraction and treatment of hard coal ash at landfill. The next highest average is photovoltaic, poly-Si roof-mounted, with 14 CTUh/TWh, due to relatively high copper inputs, inducing arsenic ion emissions from the treatment of copper slag in landfills. The rest of technologies also emit small amounts of arsenic ion to water through the production of cast iron, ferronickel, and steel alloys.
This is talking about landfills, but also think about mining. The mining tailings of rare earths in China for example are severely polluting the environment, causing problems many generations down the line. Or, speaking about mining, how ‘sustainable’ is it that we have slavery, human traficking and child labour in many parts of the world, for example in mining our cobalt?
But yes, eventually all solar panels and wind turbines are only partly recycled and a lot ends up in a landfill. A recent research pointed out that we’ll have up to 160 kiloton of lead, tellurium and cadmium coming from PV panels in the environment by 2050. Possibly somewhere in the third world, so we in the West don’t really have to think about it too much, again. Mind you, this stuff will be toxic forever.
Contrast this with nuclear waste, which isn’t actually waste. Last year WePlanet published the report What a waste where the point was hammered in that spent nuclear fuel actually contains up to 96% of the energy, which we just discard. What a waste indeed! Fast breeders can make good use of that ‘waste’, powering some countries having these stockpiles for centuries. Imagine that, no more mining, complete energy independence, leaving no waste.
No waste at all? Well, some waste is left, the so called short lived isotopes. This group of radioactive elements has short half-lives and are what makes spent nuclear fuel dangerous as it means they’re highly radioactive. However, the longest half lives of the bunch, caesium-137 and strontium-90, is about 30 years. After ten half-lives their radioactivity has dropped to background levels. So that’s 300 years. Can we store something safely for 300 years? Sure!
With the development of molten salt reactors, we actually get into the territory of completely recycling even these short-lived isotopes, see for example this paper from last year. If we reach that level, we can reuse pretty much any isotope for medical, industrial or even household appliant use (like smoke detectors). There would virtually be no waste left at the end. Finland is about to officially open the first deep geological repository in the world. It might be the only one we’ll ever really need.
So yes, nuclear energy is, at every stage of its lifecycle, the most sustainable energy form we have for the foreseeable future. We better start (re)appropriating this to our cause.
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