Small Modular nuclear Reactors are safer than the consequences of climate change

I’m going to argue in this short commentary that producing electricity from nuclear energy is safer than waiting for the consequences of climate change to kill us. Let me start by relating a story.

I was discussing with a group of friends concerned about climate change the possibility of using Small Modular nuclear Reactors (SMRs) as a carbon-free source of base-load energy. Someone asked, “But is nuclear power really safe?”

I was reminded of being asked much the same question after a presentation I gave in Los Angeles on human factors aspects of the Three Mile Island accident. A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle asked me, “Are nuclear power plants really safe?” That ground had already been plowed in a number of the day’s presentations, so I asked him how he’d traveled from San Francisco to LA for the meeting. “On Highway 101,” he said. “Yeah;” I said, “they’re safer than that.”

Safety is freedom from risk and no major means of energy production is free of risk; nuclear power is no exception. Still, studies have shown that per kilowatt hour, nuclear power is safer than other means of generating electricity (James Conca, 2012).

By far the deadliest way to produce energy is by burning coal, which has been killing us ever since the Industrial Revolution began its march in 1750. New research has shown that burning fossil fuels were responsible for 8.7 million deaths globally in 2018 (Karn Vohra, et al., 2021). That’s an astounding 20% of all people who died that year. Coal is the worst offender.

Two concerns often raised about nuclear power are the front and back end of the nuclear cycle — uranium mining and nuclear waste. Yet mining coal is not only the most dangerous industrial occupation, but it and the extraction of other fossil fuels are worse insults to both health and the environment. The waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that produced by a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy (Mara Hvistendahl, 2007).

Of course as we now know, the deadliest waste of burning coal and other fossil fuels is the CO2 and CH4 (Methane) we’re spewing into the atmosphere. Scientists have been telling us for decades that continuing on our current path will lead to regions of the Earth being uninhabitable. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been labeled a “code red” for humanity (United Nations, 8/9/2021).

The unrelenting warming of the Earth caused by human activities (a cause the IPCC states is “unequivocal”) has by now, well known consequences: sea level rise, deadly heat waves, more frequent and fierce wildfires, drought and desertification. As much as a quarter of the World’s population faces severe water shortages (Anastasia Moloney, 2020).

These are the “known knowns,” as a former Secretary of Defense once put it while discussing the Iraq War. The “known unknowns” include the degree to which humans can continue to warm the planet without triggering abrupt and/or irreversible climate change. This can occur when a small amount of additional warming triggers a qualitative change in part of the climate system. According to Professor Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter, these “tipping points” occur when “reinforcing (positive) feedbacks within a system take over from stabilizing (negative) feedbacks and propel change from one state to another” (Timothy M. Lenton, 2021).

The state we’ll be in at that point is anybody’s guess.

Small Modular nuclear Reactors have been used safely and reliably for decades in the Nuclear Navy (James Conca, 2019). They can be built in a quarter of the time it takes to build a traditional nuclear power plant at a fraction of the up-front cost. SMRs modular design allows users to scale up plants to meet current and future energy needs, and gives utilities strategic latitude in financial exposure. But their most important advantage relative to fossil fuels, as well as to wind and solar energy, is that they are a carbon-free source of dispatchable energy.

Some argue that fossil fuels have helped lift humanity out of poverty. If so, it’s been a bargain with the devil. Isn’t it time that we recognize the folly of rejecting nuclear power out of a failure to understand relative risks? Small Modular nuclear Reactors and other next generation advanced reactors must serve as an essential step forward in the challenge to reach NetZero.