At the 28th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) held in December 2023, 22 countries pledged to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050. The signatories – including the United States, France, Japan and the United Kingdom – represent just over half of all countries with existing nuclear installations and a quarter of global primary energy. While China and India were not signatories to the pledge, both are expanding their nuclear share, while their total energy consumption continues to grow at a rapid rate.
On the other end of the spectrum, heavy industrial economies Germany and Taiwan continue to swim against the tide. They are committed to decommissioning their remaining nuclear power plants. It appears that the two are exceptions in what is a growing trend towards accepting nuclear’s role in achieving net zero targets.
Why nuclear?
After booming during the Cold War era, major incidents in the late 1970s and 80s culminated in the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986 and drove a rise in popular movements against nuclear power. The backlash led to the abandonment and reversal of existing and new plant programmes in most of the developed world, while the technology penetration into emerging economies stalled. Since the early 90s, the global number of operating reactors and their generation capacity have been stagnant as new grid connections were offset by the decommissioning of existing plants. Japan’s Fukushima accident in 2011 did little to arrest the souring sentiment.
Why the sudden pivot at COP28? There are three key pillars behind the acceptance of nuclear’s role in a new global energy mix.
1. Climate change: 2050 global net zero ambitions are accelerating the decline in baseload energy production from coal-based power plants, while simultaneously increasing the demand for electrification as we transition away from diesel and petrol-fuelled internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. This means electricity intensity of global growth is rising, and with it a greater demand for a reliable, clean base load.
2. Energy security and equity: A decade of underinvestment in energy feedstock alongside Russia’s invasion of Ukraine accelerated perennial concerns around energy security globally. Here, nuclear is viewed as one of the puzzle pieces in reducing the dependence on imported fossil fuels. This is particularly relevant in regions where renewables will take a smaller share, as geographic differences mean sun, wind and hydropower are not equally abundant and viable, while constraints on storage technology remain.
3. Safety: With the benefit of hindsight, studies have now converged on the reality that nuclear is one of the safest sources of reliable electricity. The three largest incidents on record (Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl) have had fewer than 50 deaths because of radiation in the subsequent decades. In Japan, scientists found it difficult to justify moving anyone away from Fukushima Daiichi on grounds of radiological protection.
How much nuclear do we need by 2050? The International Energy Agency (IEA)’s 2023 Net Zero roadmap sets out a pathway to limiting global warming to 1.5%. This is the scientific community’s broad consensus on the tipping point for how much global temperatures can rise, beyond which our ability to arrest further deteriorating and knock-on effects significantly declines.
The roadmap models more than a doubling of global nuclear capacity numbers by 2050 to meet Net Zero Emissions (NZE) targets. More conservative assumptions are included in the continuation of policies in place (STEPS) or incorporating current pledges (APS). Both of these fall below the required levels to meet net zero targets but would still see installed capacity rise by 50% to 80% compared to the 2020 baseline. These are significant increases after more than three decades of no growth.
Bottlenecks
While it remains the gold standard when it comes to reliability, safety and emissions, nuclear plants require more time to build and have higher upfront construction costs.
This means nuclear plants have:
- Large upfront financing, which places technology out of reach of broad-scale adoption in less developed economies and those lacking broad network infrastructure.
- Levelised costs of electricity (LCOE – a measure of cost per unit of electricity produced over the lifecycle of a plant), which has risen more than productivity gains over the past decade, alongside materials and labour inflation. This is more so in developed economies, with a higher cost of construction.
- High project costs, which are much more sensitive to interest rates when compared to competing renewable energy. Under low interest rate regimes, the levelised cost of electricity is competitive with shorter lifecycle renewable energies. However, as interest rates rise, nuclear quickly becomes uncompetitive as a result of its longer lead times.
Investing in the nuclear renaissance
The bulk of new patents and innovations in energy over the past 20 years have centred around renewables. This has increased efficiencies, driven down costs and accelerated the path to commercialisation.
While fewer resources have been deployed in nuclear, we have nonetheless seen some significant technological breakthroughs in the science, design and engineering of nuclear plants. These include the development of small modular reactors, advancements in cooling technology and the promise of nuclear fusion as an alternative to fission technology.
These innovations play an important role in overcoming the remaining obstacles to broad-based adoption, specifically by reducing nuclear waste production and water consumption, allowing for smaller-scale nuclear plants with lower upfront costs, as well as reducing the risk and impact of plant accidents.
Continued investment, as well as clearer policy frameworks and funding plans, will go a long way towards reducing the remaining cost and implementation hurdles, not dissimilar to the role they played in facilitating renewable energy at scale. This will pave the way for nuclear to take its place as part of a policy mix necessary to achieve net zero within a set of practical constraints.