The nuclear option

“It’s just words,” exclaimed James Hansen a few days after COP23, the 2017 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany. “Politicians say we have to prevent catastrophic climate change,” the climate expert continues. “But a conference like this makes no difference. Government leaders pat each other on the back and smile politely for the camera. But all those words? Bullshit.”

James Lovelock, who proposed understanding Earth as a living organism — a fertile but ultimately scientifically flimsy idea — warned twenty years ago that we did not have time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear — the one safe, available, energy source — now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet.”

That impatience seems to characterize those who, for decades, have worked to push the structural changes needed to achieve at least a reasonable decarbonization before the floor turns to lava, often defending nuclear energy. That sense of urgency is where Marco Visscher’s *The Power of Nuclear* (2024) begins, with the sole goal of reconstructing “the incredible story of a technology that was misunderstood from the beginning. A story of life and death, of hope and fear.”

The climate crisis imposes a physical reality that transcends ideological or aesthetic preferences. It is an urgent thermodynamic problem demanding immediate decarbonization of the electrical grid. The dominant narrative, however, often leans excessively on renewable energy, as if renewables alone were the path to net-zero emissions. That would be an ideal scenario, but there is an unavoidable technical constraint: the inherent intermittency of sun and wind, which forces reliance on storage or firm sources like hydroelectric or nuclear power to ensure continuity and stability of supply.

Relying exclusively on intermittent sources to meet current energy needs is not a viable option. Perhaps involuntarily, Germany offered us a real‑world experiment on this front. By shutting down its nuclear plants in a post‑Fukushima panic in 2023, it pivoted to coal‑fired power plants — the very ones that account for a third of global electricity generation. According to a recent study, this produced a notable increase in emissions that led to thousands of additional deaths from air pollution.

Despite talk of a supposed triumphant return of coal, it’s worth keeping in mind that its use only increased temporarily — by 9% between 2021 and 2022 — before falling to 39% below pre‑crisis levels in 2024. What the reliance on coal demonstrates is that there is a real need for energy sources that work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In that regard, nuclear power is an obviously better choice. There are big future plans to use large‑scale batteries to someday meet current needs, but Lovelock would place them in the visionary category.

When we look at efficiency, the numbers are so overwhelming they seem ridiculous. Verónica Garea, a nuclear engineer and president of the INVAP Foundation in Argentina, offers an image that’s hard to forget: “All the energy a person consumes over 80 years can be produced with the uranium that fits inside a ping‑pong ball.” The energy density of nuclear fission is so absurdly higher than any alternative that it breaks our intuition.

This density has another fundamental consequence: land use. To generate one gigawatt of power, a nuclear plant requires barely 9 square kilometers. To obtain the same power from solar energy, you would need to cover an area larger than the city of Amsterdam. In a world where biodiversity is collapsing because we steal space from nature for our crops and cities, spatial efficiency is a first‑order ecological argument. Yet we often prefer to carpet entire landscapes with panels and mirrors rather than consider the compact, efficient solution of nuclear power.

Of course, the elephant in this room glows in the dark, according to popular imagination. Fear of nuclear power is a fascinating cultural phenomenon, fed by decades of science fiction and systematic disinformation. As with the fear of flying, risk perception is completely divorced from the statistics. If we go by the data, nuclear is the safest way to generate energy ever invented, with a mortality rate per terawatt‑hour that is a tiny fraction of that from coal, oil, or even natural gas.

Chernobyl and Fukushima are often cited as irrefutable proof of an atomic apocalypse. It’s worth pausing on them. At Fukushima, no one died from radiation. The tragic deaths that occurred were a consequence of the tsunami, the panic during evacuation, and the negative impact of leaving homes — not of the meltdowns. Even at Chernobyl, the worst possible accident from an inherently unstable Soviet design lacking modern containment structures, the number of victims is orders of magnitude smaller than the deaths that the burning of fossil fuels causes every day, silently and acceptably, through respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

Comparing energy sources by their death tolls is in bad taste, but these are the terms in which the debate is often framed. Perhaps a little over a century of working on the mysteries of the atom hasn’t been enough to displace ignorant fears about radiation. After all, it is tragic how millions of deaths from air pollution are tolerated while the impossibly high standards of the nuclear industry are demanded to be higher and higher.

The other great fear is waste, so fearsome because it’s portrayed as eternal. Garea makes a crucial point about waste economics: “Nuclear is the only electricity‑generating industry that manages its own waste” — a cost already included in each kilowatt‑hour generated. The volume is ridiculously small; all the nuclear waste generated by the U.S. electric industry in 60 years would fit in a single football field stacked a few meters high. By comparison, a tiny uranium pellet (about 2.54 cm tall) equals the energy produced by nearly 5,000 m³ of natural gas, 565 liters of oil, and 907 kg of coal.

This contrasts sharply with what happens to fossil fuel waste, which is simply dumped into the atmosphere, socializing the environmental and health costs among all the planet’s inhabitants. Or with solar panels and wind turbine blades, which at the end of their life often end up in landfills because recycling them is complex and costly — an environmental liability that no one accounts for on the electricity bill. As for coal, it generates a huge volume of waste, often dumped near poor communities, loaded with toxic arsenic, mercury, and lead. To argue that nuclear power is expensive because it takes care of its own garbage, while other sources are cheap because they externalize their environmental costs, is an accounting trap.

France understood this equation of costs and climate urgency. Driven by the oil crisis of the 1970s, the country adopted the Messmer Plan to achieve total energy security. In just fifteen years, they built 48 standardized reactors and managed to cover more than 75% of their energy needs. This translated into a 60% drop in per‑capita emissions since 1974, while today their electricity costs remain 40% lower than Germany’s — and, accidentally, they gained an advantage in the race to net zero. Their nuclear capacity even demonstrated flexibility in integrating solar power, a technically viable collaboration that prioritizes pragmatism.

In recent years, nuclear energy has returned to the center of the energy discourse, but with a nuance worth noting. Garea warns that this new momentum “comes more from the needs of data centers for artificial intelligence than from a concern for energy justice.” It would be a cruel irony if the clean, dense energy we need — capable of cleaning our atmosphere — ends up being hoarded to feed chatbots and image generators, while much of humanity continues to suffer energy deficits.

As Garea continues, “We still have people in energy poverty who either have no access to electricity, or have access to less than they need because they can’t afford it.” Energy justice means prioritizing people, not server farms.

This contradiction between human need and public perception is what Visscher explored while researching his book. An article from the year 2000 mentioned that at a climate conference, nuclear energy had been defended as a “safe and clean” way to generate electricity. In the text, its author denounced that nuclear power had nothing good to offer “people and nature” and that it was “time to bring down the nuclear industry before it ruins the 21st century.”

Remarkably, the article was written by Visscher himself. His unyielding opinion changed as nuclear energy became an increasingly important part of public discussions in the Netherlands, leading him to conclude that “almost everything we think we know about nuclear power turns out to be wrong.” Similarly, in 2018, the Union of Concerned Scientists — founded in 1969 to “initiate a critical and continuing examination of governmental policy in areas where science and technology have actual or potential significance” — reversed its historic opposition to nuclear power, pointing to organizations that fight to shut down nuclear plants while defining global warming as an existential threat.

I grew up in a house where it was important to support Greenpeace, but we also read Dawkins and had a copy of *Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth* (1979), Lovelock’s book. A kind of naive common sense reigned about the negative view of nuclear energy. Until I was old enough to care about the evidence.

Perhaps in a few decades, if we manage to overcome this ideological inertia, it will be hard to understand how we were capable of so much hesitation when it came to use the most powerful resource available. Or perhaps we will look back at these years with the nostalgia that comes from having been able to do something to avert disaster.

Contrary to public perception or what The Simpsons would have you believe, nuclear plants are extremely safe.

This text was originally published in 2025 in Spanish.

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