A recent study suggests that nuclear might ‘crowd out’ renewables and may not, in fact, lead to decarbonisation. Jeremy Gordon looks deeper.
Being anti-nuclear is now so passe´ that even Greenpeace won’t admit to it. Jan Haverkamp was already well established as one of Greenpeace’s leading anti-nuclear campaigners in Europe when I started writing about nuclear in 2004 and he is still on the scene. So it was surprising when he said on social media that he has “no anti-nuclear mandate”. It is weird not to stand up and be counted for a cause, having dedicated one’s career to it — I’m more than happy to say that I think the human race’s misunderstanding of nuclear energy has caused it to miss one of its biggest opportunities and that I’m working to put that right. But it is now too embarrassing for Haverkamp to admit that he thinks “sabotaging nuclear is a vital part of any successful attempt to save the climate”, which he tweeted last year.
These are confusing times for all of us. The dialogue around nuclear has changed on social media in the last few years, and continues to do so. When Hitachi announced they would step back from new build at Wylfa Newydd it was a slam dunk for the Green Party, which had wanted that result all along. However, their gleeful tweet that “Nuclear carries an unacceptable risk for the communities living nearby” was met with a chorus of disapproval. The many replies they received were not aggressive, or even overtly pro-nuclear, but showed disdain for Green glee at the cancellation of a project that would have brought jobs to an area of Wales that needs them badly. The replies were not so much pro- nuclear, but pro-Wales, pro-jobs and anti-climate change.
You shouldn’t read too much into the chaos of social media interactions, but they do give a real-time temperature check on how some sections of the public feel. And leading institutions increasingly show us how they feel as well. “Without nuclear power, the world’s climate challenge will get a whole lot harder,” wrote Rafael Mariano Grossi and Fatih Birol, heads of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Energy Agency. “Given the scale and urgency of the climate challenge, we do not have the luxury of excluding nuclear from the tools at our disposal,” wrote Grossi and Birol.
It’s easy to see why going against this barrage of common sense is getting uncomfortable, even for lifelong campaigners. But that has not stopped them. Having abandoned scare stories and moralistic arguments in the face of evidence (ie a better informed public that no longer falls for them), nuclear opponents can still fall back on motivated research. When you cannot admit your real motivations, you have to manufacture excuses. When the false dichotomy and the tribalism of ‘renewables vs nuclear’ is dying, you have to reinvigorate it. Enter Benjamin K Sovacool and his friends with a study designed to do just that.
Published in Nature Energy, the paper Differences in carbon emissions reduction between countries pursuing renewable electricity versus nuclear power gives itself away by using ‘versus’ in the title.
You can find detailed debunkings of the paper online, but its problems were clear for all to see. The study is supposed to compare the rates of decarbonisation achieved by countries focusing on nuclear, with what was achieved by those focusing on renewables. A third idea examined in the paper was that positivity towards nuclear might ‘crowd out’ renewables and thereby slow down decarbonisation.
On these premises, no country could support both technologies in an energy mix. Every country had to be either slanted towards nuclear or towards renewables. But at the same time, no possibility was allowed for a country to have a slant towards particular renewable sources and there was no examination of whether they might crowd each other out, as they surely do in reality. After all, there is only so much demand to be met.
The inclusion of hydro among the renewables deepened the paper’s flaws. It is elementary in the energy business that a country cannot build lots of hydro unless it has large mountains and rivers, no matter how much it loves renewables. It’s also elementary that nuclear energy has not been a practical option available to every country, for reasons mainly of wealth or development. The preconditions for large hydro are completely different to the preconditions for nuclear and, worldwide, that means comparing completely different countries. For one thing, the 30 nuclear countries in the study tended to be more developed and larger, with on average higher emissions all along.
The abuse of the renewable category is another of the paper’s sins. It treats all renewables as if they are all equally available and do not compete with each other, while letting large hydro dominate. Then it pitches the whole lot as a team against nuclear. It was surely part of Sovacool’s calculations that the public idea of ‘renewables’ is wind and solar, not large hydro. The paper inadvertently makes the case that the category should be retired and the sources considered separately.
The paper’s worst sin, however, it to ignore the most fundamental thing of all about energy policy — that each country is different. As a professor of energy policy Sovacool decided to ignore that each country has its own geography, its own resources, its own security needs, and its own economic and industrial capabilities. In doing so he also papers over the fact that a county’s fossil fuel situation is hugely influential on energy policy. None of the words ‘fossil’, ‘coal’ or ‘gas’ appear in the study at all.
On top of all that, when a study can only compare 30 countries using nuclear to all the rest it has less statistical power than an AA battery.
It is alarming that the paper got through peer review, and also that the editors of Nature Energy published it. From there, credulous editors including at New Scientist spread the word far and wide. What a surprise, then, to learn that Sovacool is on the advisory panel of Nature Energy.
As a report designed to divide the community, to entrench people into camps on both sides of the nuclear vs renewable divide, and to reverse the progress that had been made, it was relatively successful. There was a swift and strong response from official and unofficial supporters of nuclear, as well as respected technology neutral policy specialists and environmentalists.
The renewable industry should be uncomfortable receiving Sovacool’s support, just as nuclear should be uncomfortable with the indirect boost it gets from gratuitous attacks on renewables. Decarbonisation and the policy debates it fosters are not matches between sports teams that should be reported play-by-play with winners and losers. When opponents of nuclear do not admit to it anymore, we have to ask who else would set up a false contest so they could announce a victory over it?
The study may be retracted, as was a similar 2016 attempt by Sovacool to show that supporting nuclear led to less action on emissions. But this happens only after the headlines have been written, consumed and shared by those who already agreed with the conclusions and weren’t too bothered by the quality of the reasoning.
It’s clear the anti-movement has lost its grip, is out of date and embarrassing, but it’s not done yet. Sovacool remains widely celebrated and when the dust settles on this project, I’m sure he will get back to concentrating on his job as the lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report. What could go wrong?
Read a response from the authors of the paper
Jeremy Gordon is an independent communication consultant with 15 years of experience in the international energy industry. His company Fluent in Energy supports partners of all kinds to communicate matters of clean energy and sustainable development.
Cartoon by Alexy Kovynev
