Nuclear Power 4: Follow the Yellow-cake Road?

Yellow Cake Road

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You may be surprised to hear that our SweetLightning editorial team doesn’t always agree. When we don't, our first response is to plunge into more research and gather more data and facts to bring to the conversation. This makes for slow, thoughtful arguments. In our best cases, this broadens each of us, and does not tend to reinforce extreme points of view. In fact, one of the greatest benefits of doing this work is to upend some pre-conceived world view that we have held.  By doing this we grow our knowledge and understanding of the world. 

During the writing of the "Nukes" series, we encountered more differing views than usual. It turns out that in the early drafts, we included opinions rather than facts in some instances. In the editing of the articles, we burned away most of the opinions and concentrated on the facts. That still left us at the end with different views about what the facts implied. We decided to put together this article to enable each of us to express our individual opinions about nuclear power.

We made the question to be answered as general as possible to allow a wide range of opinions to be included. Very specific questions can often be reduced to a specific answer that is correct, as it would be in “ does nuclear energy reduce atmospheric GHGs?” So the question we landed on is:

Is nuclear energy “green”?

This enables us to each interpret what we mean by “green” as part of setting out our opinions. We are trying this out. If it works we may do more. Anyway here are our opinions.

Adze writes:

Should we continue skipping down the yellow-cake road in hopes of fulfilling the promise of green nuclear energy waiting to solve all our climate change problems when we reach the emerald city?

In a word, no.

I think, like Dorothy  in Oz, what first appears to be green turns out to be an illusion when you get closer and remove the tinted glasses.

I accept that risks from accidents in the nuclear energy supply chain and generation operations are relatively low.

I do, however, have trouble accepting the basic premise of nuclear power, relying as it does on extracting and using nuclear fuels, which seems to me to violate a fundamental premise of long-term sustainability. That is, we cannot extract toxic substances from the Earth’s crust, increase their concentrations, and insert them into the ecosphere at a rate faster than the ecosphere has evolved to recycle them back into the crust. This applies to fossil fuels as well, of course, which also need to be phased out.

Nuclear fuels seem to me to be particularly egregious because of some of the fission waste products. While not all nuclear fuel fission products are immediately toxic in the short term, and have relatively short half-lives, some are, both radiologically and chemically, and they have extremely long half-lives. Plutonium-239 (perhaps the most toxic) has a half-life of 24,100 years, Technetium‑99 210,000 years, and Cesium-135 a staggering 2.3 million years.

I think it is the height of hubris to think we can design and build storage or containment systems that will remain intact over the time frames needed. Storage facilities currently being constructed in Finland are designed to last 100,000 years. We only emerged from the last glacial period less than 12,000 years ago and in some places the land under that ice is still rebounding and deforming. I think it highly likely we’ll enter another glacial period in the next 100,000 years. How will storage, even far underground, fare under a massive ice sheet that will compress the land over it?

Straying somewhat from the “is it green” question, I also think nuclear power, even if the storage question were solved unequivocally, is bad economics. Nuclear power plants are incredibly expensive, have always been subsidized, and take too long to build.

We need low-carbon power sources now, not in the 10-15 years it takes to build new nuclear plants at the scale required. Renewables like wind and solar, combined with battery and other storage, can be and are being deployed more quickly.

In an increasingly unstable world large central plants are also susceptible to disruption. Wars and natural disasters make it too easy to knock out power to large chunks of the population, whether through munitions or cyber warfare. The Russian attacks on Ukraine are a prime example. Better to focus on distributed renewable sources with storage, and reform the grids to accommodate them.

If the subsidy money for nuclear were re-directed to existing known renewable-plus-storage solutions, to emerging renewables like deep geothermal, and to reforming the grid to better deal with them, we could transition to green electricity faster and cheaper than continuing down the nuclear road.

Seamus writes: 

My quick answer: Nuclear power in its current form is unacceptable, but new technologies may be useful in a few specialized cases.

Humanity generally accepts that we must decarbonize energy production before the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere impose external solutions upon us.

The path to 2035 will be the beginning of the age of carbon-free electricity:

• For at least the next decade (and probably until 2050), global electricity demand will outpace economic growth. Demand will continue to rise by three or four percent a year,¹ at the same time as decarbonization of world energy sources becomes increasingly urgent.
• Most of the new capacity will be added by renewables, with lesser additions from nuclear and natural gas. By 2035, renewables and nuclear together will supply over half of global electricity.
• The percentage supplied by nuclear power will remain flat or perhaps even dip a little, but in a high-growth global context this means that new nuclear capacity will continue to be added; the nuclear fleet will need to be (as U2 said in a different moment) "running to stand still". Many ageing nuclear plants, nearing the end of their planned lifetimes, will be refurbished ... in part to avoid sudden losses in low-carbon capacity.
• Coal generation will likely peak and then begin to decline fairly rapidly. Coal-plant power will largely be replaced as renewables expand.
• Storage issues will be minimized by smart grids, increased localization of storage, and lots of flexible power choices.
• Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) that are in the design phase now will generally not add major capabilities to the world's power grid before 2035.^{2, 3} Seven units or so are operating or under construction (depending on how you define things). The NEA's Small Modular Reactor Dashboard⁴ edition says developers and site owners are currently discussing 51 more small modular reactors worldwide.

The difference in build cost and implementation speed between nuclear and renewables is stark, mostly driven by contrast between the fine granularity of renewables (which can easily and quickly be added by individual consumers and utilities of any size in most parts of the world) and the coarser, staggering up-front costs and regulatory hurdles of new nuclear power ... even of small modular nuclear power. At least some of these proposed reactor projects are notional; they won't find investors, pass regulatory hurdles, and yield actual power plants. Consultants, however, will make a bundle.

Post-war society has been in love with "build big, build bold, and build now,"⁵ in part because mega-projects mean good things within the nearly-antique proclivity of governments to use GDP (Gross Domestic Product) as a measure of national success.⁶ But an important part of progress this century will be to unbind that much-needed boldness from the optional necessities of extractive industries ... to find instead ways to thrive that don't depend on uptake of a constant flow of consumables and on output of a constant trail of toxic detritus.

At the moment, we're often like Saint Augustine: we want the environment to be made pure, but just not yet ....⁷

We can make tactical choices here. Renewables have been called "unstoppable."⁸ Let's make sure they stay that way. Let's make sure the current surge of renewables is maintained and, in fact, amplified. The worst possible thing we can do is to attempt to cripple and hinder research into renewables and their widespread adoption. The project size and profitability that make us want to preserve high-polluting extractive industries (I'm looking at Mar-a-Lago when I say this) are insufficient benefits.

So, is nuclear green? Hell, no. While it has a low carbon-emission profile, it's an extractive industry that leaves behind horrible wastes. It's not a "future technology," it's a relic of late-industrial thinking.

Will nuclear capacity expand? Yes. We're already committed to more nuclear installations, but not as many as one might think.

What do we do about it? Take a tactical approach to retire nuclear power:

1. Weaponize renewables research. The better we get at renewables, the weaker the arguments for planned nuclear installations will become. Let's work as hard and as fast as we possibly can to make the question of nuclear power moot. We'll inevitably get some new nuclear plants, but could forestall most of the growth there. Renewables can outperform nuclear, especially if we make that a well-funded design goal.
2. Admit we really don't have ways to deal with all the nuclear waste that has been — or soon will be — produced. The idea of storing it at all is tragically naive and shockingly arrogant: just as a civilization filled with internal-combustion heat engines cannot safely disregard a century of using the atmosphere as a dump for greenhouse-gas-inducing waste, so too can the nuclear industry not treat its waste as an externality to be tucked away, not properly handled, and not counted as the high expense it will continue to be. We have to do something about that. While we probably know enough physics and chemistry, we have ignored the issue for many decades.
3. We must continue to fund waste-reduction projects like NEWTON⁹ (which will use particle accelerators to transmute radioactive isotopes) and more research into fast reactors with integrated recycling that can burn waste stockpiles.¹⁰ Neither of these approaches justify more nuclear capacity, but we must do a better job with existing waste. But that's a subject for a different article.

WrenchMonkey writes:

I have pretty much always been accused of being an idealist. This gets me to thinking about a world where we are not harming the environment. Our focus here has been primarily on climate change, but there are many other ways that we are harming the environment.

If I take off my idealist hat for a moment and put on a pragmatist hat, I can get to a place where nuclear power generation is a very light shade of green. This from the climate change perspective of reducing green house gases, which nuclear power generation does.

We have a great deal of fossil fuel generation to replace in the next 30 years if we are going to ameliorate global warming. Every source of non-GHG generation needs to employed to reach that goal. While moving immediately to renewables/batteries for generation would be ideal, I don't think it is practical and has little chance of being done. Nuclear generation should be part of the mix of power generation until fossil fuels generation is eliminated. After that we can work on continuing to make the generation mix more renewable.

If we look out longer I don't think nuclear power as we know it today should be part of our generation mix. So in that sense, not a part of our "green" future.

Reading

1. IEA. “Electricity 2026 – Analysis.” February 6, 2026. https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2026.
2. Schneider et al. “World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2025 (HTML version).” World Nuclear Industry Status Report, November 26, 2025. https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/World-Nuclear-Industry-Status-Report-2025-HTML-version.
3. International Atomic Energy Agency. Small Modular Reactors: Advances in SMR Developments 2024. Vienna: IAEA, 2024. Accessed February 10, 2026. https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/p15790-PUB9062_web.p
4. Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA). “New NEA Small Modular Reactor Dashboard Edition Reveals Global Expansion of SMR Deployment.” Accessed February 10, 2026. https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_108268/new-nea-small-modular-reactor-dashboard-edition-reveals-global-expansion-of-smr-deployment.
5. News, Nunatsiaq. “Carney Promises to ‘Build Big, Build Bold’ in 1st News Conference since Election.” Nunatsiaq News, May 2, 2025. https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/carney-promises-to-build-big-build-bold-in-1st-news-conference-since-election/.
6. United Nations University. “Moving Beyond GDP: Measuring Human and Planetary Well-Being.” March 21, 2026. https://unu.edu/cpr/blog-post/moving-beyond-gdp-measuring-human-and-planetary-well-being.
7. Augustinus, Aurelius. Confessiones. 8.7.
8. “Science’s 2025 Breakthrough of the Year: The Unstoppable Rise of Renewable Energy.” Accessed February 10, 2026. https://www.science.org/content/article/breakthrough-2025.
9. “NEWTON | ARPA-E.” Accessed March 9, 2026. https://arpa-e.energy.gov/programs-and-initiatives/view-all-programs/newton.
10. Till, Charles E., and Yoon Il Chang. Plentiful Energy: The Story of the Integral Fast Reactor: The Complex History of a Simple Reactor Technology, with Emphasis on Its Scientific Basis for Non-Specialists. Seattle: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011.
    The Argonne National Laboratory's "Integrated Fast Breeder Reactor" (IFBR) design was used for generating electric power, but it can in fact be used as industrial infrastructure for transmuting nuclear waste into much-more benign forms. It may also generate electricity as it does this, but (in this context at least) that's secondary to its waste-management possibilities. A lot of work on proper handling, scaling, and integration still remains to be done, but the science is essentially sound.