Fearmongering is Killing Nuclear Power

Nuclear power has been a controversial topic for decades. People now very frequently echo the narrative that they’ve been told: nuclear power plants have resulted in disaster and loss, thus they must be avoided to keep humans safe. This has led to the suffocation of an industry full of untapped potential. These people have been blinded by politicians, who have strung along this story about nuclear for their own benefit - using people’s fear of disasters to generate support for themselves. In this article, we will sift through what has been said and find the truth among all the hearsay. By hearing the facts around nuclear power, we will be able to act against the false media and decide to utilise an efficient, clean and abundant electricity source that will give society the energy it needs to thrive.

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During the 1960s and the 1970s, nuclear power was widely accepted as an effective method of supplying more energy for the world and was adopted as such. Between 1967 and 1972, 48 new nuclear power plants were constructed in the United States (US) alone. Yet their proliferation has since considerably slowed. Furthermore, post-1972, three fatal nuclear meltdowns shook the world: Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011. Chernobyl in particular left the public horrified of nuclear; current estimates attribute victim-status to around 1.8 million Ukrainians alone. Politicians opposed to nuclear energy are quick to point to numbers like these in an effort to gain public support, utilising their immense scale. By honing this narrative of nuclear power being a constant threat to public safety, they gain support through their promises to act against all nuclear power and shut it down.

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Examples of this can be seen very commonly throughout the United Sates. Andrew Cuomo in 2007, the eventual governor of New York, both promoted the voices of anti-nuclear campaigners and voiced his own concern around nuclear projects. He described nuclear power as “risky” and targeted the Indian Point Energy Centre as a threat that must be removed. As a result of this, the nuclear power station supplying a quarter of all electricity to downtown New York was closed in April 2021 on the grounds of being a public threat, despite no reasonable evidence to suggest this. Jan Schakowsky, a US Congresswoman from Illinois, also spreads her negative opinions on nuclear energy, saying she “consistently opposed nuclear power” due to “ongoing concerns over safety”, whilst also mentioning to “protect against the threat of nuclear meltdowns”. The United States position as a global superpower results in greater amplification of these politicians’ comments and their overarching theme of fear globally.

As of writing this article, 12 US States have imposed strong restrictions on the construction of nuclear power plant facilities: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont. Twelve nuclear power stations have been permanently closed across the US since 2012.

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On top of fission reactor shutdowns, startup nuclear fusion operations such as Helion’s magneto-inertial reactor Polaris have missed their completion dates. Polaris was promised to be operational by the summer of 2025 but has since missed that deadline due to a lack of funding. The public’s opinion, having been heavily influenced by what they’ve been shown online and from the strong opinions of politicians, has been driven to a very negative perspective around nuclear. Consequently, there is very little motivation within countries to continue funding nuclear research and instead, they are shutting it down.

The truth of the matter is that nuclear power is not dangerous when it is handled properly. Politicians spin the story to channel the public's fear into their support, but they fail to properly explain the scenarios in which these nuclear failures occurred and how they could easily be avoided in the future.

Take, for example, the Chernobyl disaster. This power plant used "RMBK" fission reactors, which used graphite alongside water as its coolant. This made the reactors very unstable under certain conditions, a risk that the Soviet Union failed to communicate to operators of the power station. This model of reactor was used exclusively by the Soviet Union and has since been entirely reworked to ensure no possible risk to human life under proper operation.

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The common alternative used outside of Russia, light water reactors, have been much safer in practice and have not led to any loss of life, even in the large nuclear meltdowns frequently referred to today. Three Mile Island, the nuclear meltdown which shocked the United States and sparked large opposition to nuclear power, involved the failure of light water reactors. This incident had no associated loss of life nor any long-lasting impacts on the environment. Furthermore, Fukushima’s nuclear meltdown in 2011 also didn’t have any direct loss of life related to the reactor. Instead, its associated death toll was due the tsunami and earthquake, which caused the meltdown. Both of these well-known failures of nuclear reactors can be used to demonstrate that when handled safely and using well-tested methods, nuclear power stations pose no risk to public health and safety and won’t damage the environment if there is a failure in their systems.

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Collecting all this information together, we can begin to see that the disastrous events that politicians draw upon have been simply one-off accidents, and the safety steps that the nuclear industry has taken since these incidents have made risk of fatality essentially zero. Whilst Chernobyl took many lives, it served as a wake-up call for the industry to improve upon its technology to ensure greater safety, which has since been vigorously employed to large success.

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To me, renewable energy will only get us so far. The United Kingdom, as an example, will never be able to truly sustain itself off local pure renewable energy resources due to a lack of space to extract energy from. The cost of importing purely renewable energy from other countries to meet the remaining energy demand would be an unfeasible solution for the government. This is where nuclear is needed. Nuclear power plants supply large amounts of energy, and when properly harnessed they will be able to support the world in meeting its net-zero goals whilst providing energy now to tackle the ongoing energy crisis. It is also vital that technology within the nuclear industry is developed and explored, as it has the potential to solve our energy problems for good.

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Nuclear power is not a threat - it is our solution.