Forgetting Chernobyl is our best hope now

What if the Chernobyl nuclear disaster hadn’t happened? Or if the alarmism that followed had been discredited?

To be honest, I think governments would’ve found a different way to sidestep prosperity. But you can see the point I’m trying to make…

The threats and challenges we face today are largely down to dodging nuclear power. All sorts of government decisions prevented nuclear power from dominating our global grid. But what if we’d embraced the technology instead?

It’s quite astonishing to think how many of today’s problems would never have seen the light of day…

Consider, for example, Europe’s reliance on Russian gas to generate electricity. In 2021, Russia supplied 45% of the EU’s gas and 27% of its oil. Last year, 19% of Europe’s gas still came from Russia. Add in the Russian gas that’s been relabelled and you’ll get a much higher figure.

Without that gas, the European economy would…slow down even more. Not only that, it was the cheap Russian gas that gave Europe its imaginary economic growth model in the first place.

But if Europe ran on nuclear power instead of Russian gas, would Russia have dared to invade Ukraine? Or did Europe’s status as a Russian energy vassal give Putin the fuel he needed?

Could Russia have financed a war without selling so much gas to Europe? Could Europe have supported Ukraine without funding its enemy at the same time?

It’s not just Russia, of course. How much money would Middle Eastern regimes have to fund terror and wage war if the West used uranium instead of LNG today?

It’s not just gas, of course. Instead of turning to nuclear, we turned to renewables. Also known as “rebuildables” because of how often we must tear down and rebuild them.

But the wind and the sun don’t always shine. And rarely where you want them to. And so we have to build truly vast infrastructure projects to make up for it. Impossibly expensive cables across continents and oceans. Vast pumped hydro schemes. Huge batteries just to store a few minutes power.

The renewables boom made electricity grids reliant on interconnection cables that criss-cross continents and oceans to move enough power around. But if someone can sabotage a Nord Stream pipeline, and get away with it, they can cut a subsea cable too. And that has been happening rather often lately…

Worst of all, after trillions were spent on renewables and their infrastructure, the Western world is just as reliant on Russian and Middle Eastern oil and gas as before!

But we’re also stuck with dangerously variable electricity supply. A cloud can cause a blackout in Alice Springs. Too much sun can cause a blackout in Spain and Portugal.

The vast numbers of green energy jobs promised by politicians have moved to China. A country which burns its coal to produce the solar panels we buy.

What if our wholesale electricity were as stable and cheap as France’s? We might even be able to afford to build all those solar panels!

Sadly, even France linked its nuclear grid to the rest of Europe’s renewables. Much of the continent now relies on French nuclear to get them through cloudy windless days.

If nuclear had become cheaper and simpler due to economies of scale, how much more of the world would currently have better access to electricity? How many lives would widespread air conditioning save, in Europe alone?

Instead, much of the world lives in energy poverty. Consumers get paid to use less electricity. Industries have to leave the country for cheaper electricity elsewhere.

The list of costs we imposed on ourselves by avoiding nuclear is horrifying.

What about the advantages
of going nuclear?

Nuclear power plants can be located in far more places than renewables. Crucially, you can locate them where you need them. So you don’t need the vast interconnector projects that are making taxpayers feel queasy at the moment.

Nuclear is also far more reliable, so you don’t need backup in the way renewables need gas peaking plants, batteries, pumped hydro and more. Nuclear’s downtime is scheduled and controlled, allowing for planning.

There’s no need to interconnect countries across mountain ranges and oceans if they have their own nuclear dominated grid.

Nuclear power has inertia, meaning that an interruption in the electricity grid doesn’t turn into a blackout as quickly. That’s why France’s nuclear grid stopped the cascading blackout of Spain and Portugal.

Uranium fuel can be processed and produced anywhere. It’s easy and cheap to store enough nuclear fuel to power the country for many years. Countries using nuclear power have had no problems disposing of waste for decades.

The price of uranium is only a tiny fraction of the cost of running a nuclear power plant. So we’d be largely immune to price fluctuations should the likes of Canada or Australia be invaded. Yes, uranium supply is found in the sorts of jurisdictions you’d hope for.

What about nuclear power plant construction? Well, as I’m sure you know, only geopolitically unstable countries have the right specialisation. Places like South Korea, Japan, Canada and the US. We can’t rely on them…

The countless deaths in coal and oil industry would never have happened – nuclear is amongst the safest forms of generating electricity.

Nuclear power is beautifully suited to desalination plants, solving water supply problems too.

To sum it up, a nuclear powered world would’ve solved so many of our most pressing problems today.

But delusional propaganda scared us out of it.

Now what?

Nuclear power is back, but…

There is hope, I’ll give you that.

But nuclear power isn’t being rolled out at scale in a cost-efficient way. Not at a pace that will change the world, secure electricity grids, provide cheap power or solve our problems.

Bizarre regulations and an electricity grid polluted by unstable renewables are holding nuclear back.

Nobody will build a nuclear power plant on a grid that has negative electricity prices when it’s sunny or windy. Unless they get subsidised as much as renewables do for not producing power…

Because the costs of nuclear are largely fixed, their output is only cheap if the plant is run at capacity as much as possible. But our grids already often have too much power.

The point is, we’ve built an electricity system that is badly suited to adding nuclear. So, the projects that try to do so will fail.

The attempt to build small modular reactors is proof that nuclear won’t work. Nuclear is only cost efficient at scale. But only SMRs can jump through the endless hoops holding nuclear back.

The only good news is that renewables assets only have a useful life of 20 years – about the time it takes to get nuclear up and running…

So, if we ever get real about electricity, some of us might even get to see the results!

Not every country is making a mess of its electricity grid, of course. Some have the wisdom to build vast amounts of reliable and dispatchable power. And not just nuclear.

Find why they need it. And how you can profit.