“Going Nuclear” makes the case for an atomic renaissance

Nuclear chemist Tim Gregory cut his scientific teeth measuring the age of the solar system. Surrounded by meteorites in a University of Bristol lab, he attempted to date them using radioactive decay. But five years ago, his focus shifted from outer space to something closer to home: nuclear power.

Today, Gregory works at the United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory. Employing similar skills and strategies as he did when scrutinizing space rocks, he performs tasks such as analyzing nuclear reactors and ascertaining the purity of nuclear medicine. Immersed in atoms, he’s become enamored with their potential.

“Of all the branches of modern science, nuclear science in particular bears fruit that can help solve some of the most daunting challenges that beset us,” he writes. “From clean energy production, to climate change reversal, to space exploration, and to advanced medicine, nuclear science touches all corners of our modern world.”

Gregory has now shared his enthusiasm for and knowledge of all things nuclear with his new book, Going Nuclear. It might be perfectly timed. 

After decades in the doldrums, nuclear power is making a comeback of sorts. The rise of AI and its accompanying around-the-clock electricity demands have prompted companies and governments to extend the operation of current reactors, restart old ones, invest in new technologies, and ease regulations. At the same time, public sentiment towards nuclear power has turned decidedly positive.

Is now the beginning of a new nuclear renaissance? It’s entirely possible, and Gregory’s book could serve as its accessible treatise, reintroducing a curious public to nuclear’s remarkable potential without ignoring its pitfalls.

Big Think: In many ways, nuclear energy showcases the power of science: immense possibility but also sizable risks. Is that what draws you to it?

Gregory: The earliest history of nuclear energy is just scientists doing what scientists do: tinkering in the lab. Then you have all these implications of that science which culminated in the Manhattan Project and the building of the atomic bomb. That’s when research into nuclear reactors really got going. I think that’s a large part of why there’s such a hangup about nuclear power, because it’s gotten mingled with atomic bombs in people’s minds. 

But lots of areas of science that we enjoy and love also saw their inception in a military setting. For example, chemotherapy. The earliest agents of chemotherapy got their start as chemical weapons during the First World War. The rockets that send rovers to Mars were designed as agents of war. It’s unfortunate that there’s this mingling between atomic bombs and nuclear reactors because they’re different things with different goals.

Big Think: Imagine an alternate history where nuclear power didn’t arrive in the shadow of nuclear weapons. Do you think the nuclear age could have progressed differently? 

Gregory: We’ve had nuclear reactors operating commercially since the 1950s, but things really started to expand in the 1970s and ‘80s with the American and European fleets, [respectively]. If we’d have continued to build at the pace we did back then, I don’t think we’d be talking about climate change with the same level of urgency.

At the time, nuclear physicists had this tangible, optimistic sense that nuclear power would transform the world for the better, most obviously through providing plentiful, abundant, reliable clean energy. There was also hope that nuclear could boost agriculture, space exploration, medicine — there was no area in society that the atom wouldn’t touch. 

That hopeful history never came about mainly because of a very small number of high-profile accidents. They stymied early efforts and dampened that spirit. 

Big Think: Do these high-profile events deserve as much attention as they’ve garnered over the years?

Gregory: I barely write about Three Mile Island in my book because nobody died and nobody was exposed to any extra radiation. The most significant thing that came from that incident was that it effectively ended the expansion of nuclear power in North America. More nuclear reactors were built in the five years leading up to Three Mile Island than have been built since. 

It’s difficult to talk about Chernobyl without sounding like you’re diminishing it, but it is worth putting the accident into context and taking a sober view. Around 30 people died in the immediate aftermath. As for later deaths among the wider population, it was something like a few hundred — mostly from thyroid cancers among people who were young at the time, caused by a radioactive isotope of iodine that was quite abundant in the fallout. 

Every [one of these deaths] was avoidable. The disaster was ultimately a consequence of a quirky type of reactor and Soviet corruption.

Those numbers pale in significance when compared to the deaths wrought from fossil fuels every single day. More people die from fossil fuels every couple of hours than have ever died from nuclear power. 

There’s this preoccupation with deaths from nuclear power, but what’s rarely talked about are all the lives that have been saved. An interesting journal article a few years ago estimated the number of lives that were saved from nuclear power between 1971 and 2009 because of the air polluting fossil fuels that nuclear power stations displaced. The estimate comes with a fair degree of give or take, but it’s something like 1.8 million lives. Even if that number is a vast overestimation, and the death toll from all nuclear accidents were a vast underestimation, splitting atoms in nuclear power stations is still one of the safest things that humanity does.

More people die from fossil fuels every couple of hours than have ever died from nuclear power. 

Big Think: Let’s delve more into nuclear power’s safety. I don’t think many people comprehend what goes on in a nuclear reactor. Can you explain it?

Gregory: Most of the electricity in the world is created by rotating a magnet in a coil of wire. That’s it. The question is, How do you get the magnet spinning? 

[In most power plants], you get the magnet spinning by spinning a turbine with steam. Okay, so how do you make the steam? You have to boil water. How do you boil the water? You have to make something hot, and we basically have two options for that: You can either set things on fire, or you can split atoms of uranium into pieces. So, a nuclear reactor is like a giant whistling kettle. 

You need to orchestrate through what is called criticality. There’s a nuclear chain reaction inside a reactor. The conditions that you need to start that reaction, and keep it going, are delicately tuned. It’s not something that can happen easily by accident. The engineering constraints are tight and very specific. 

Moreover, the engineers who design nuclear reactors are good at what they do. They include what we call “passive safety features.” For example, there’s the negative temperature coefficient in most reactors. The hotter the reactor gets, the slower the chain reaction happens, so it peters out and the reactor cools down. Then when it cools down enough, the opposite happens and the reactor ramps up. So you get this nice kind of harmonic equilibrium where the reactor regulates itself. 

There are all sorts of these passive safety features before you even get to the on-the-nose safety features, such as dropping hundreds of control rods into the reactor that stops the reaction dead in an instant. Things can go wrong of course, but nuclear reactors are cleverly designed so that that doesn’t happen very often, which is demonstrated by nuclear’s impeccable safety record.

Big Think: What is the “boring truth” about nuclear waste?

Gregory: We’ve got this spooky perception of nuclear waste — bright green sludge running out of barrels marked with a skull and crossbones. But the truth is actually quite boring. 

First, there’s not much of it. If you generated all of your own power over your entire life from nuclear alone, the waste wouldn’t even fill a coffee cup. All of the high-level nuclear waste that’s been generated in the history of the world would fit into a modest sized concert hall. It’s just not that much. 

Second, it’s not really waste at all. Ninety-five percent of the atoms in nuclear waste can be recycled and turned back into nuclear fuel. By throwing away nuclear waste, we’re actually throwing away a potent and plentiful source of energy. Nuclear waste is also chock-full of weird isotopes that can be used in medicine and space exploration — to diagnose and cure cancers, and to create batteries that can power spacecraft in the outer solar system.

This “Atoms for Peace” stamp was issued in 1955. The phrase comes from a speech delivered by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in which he discussed the U.S.’s desire to solve the “atomic dilemma” by using atomic energy to serve peaceful purposes while avoiding the dangers of atomic weaponry. (Credit: irisphoto1 / Adobe Stock)

Big Think: Many people oppose nuclear power becoming a cornerstone of energy supply. Their two critiques are that it is too expensive and takes too long to build. Is there any truth to these criticisms?

Gregory: I share the frustrations at nuclear power stations taking way too long to build and coming in over budget. It’s undeniable that they do in Europe and in North America. But if you look at the history of nuclear power, it wasn’t always like this. We used to build nuclear reactors very quickly and at scale. France is the best example of that. They built 55 nuclear reactors in 25 years. Compare that to the build time in North America or Europe now: It’s over a decade, and the budget just goes up and up. 

But it’s important to realize that this isn’t just a problem with nuclear reactors. This is a problem in general with the West’s chronic inability to build large pieces of infrastructure, whether it be high-speed rail networks, new homes and hospitals, new motorways and tunnels.

Look over at Asia, and the median build time for a nuclear reactor is the same as what it was in Europe in the 1980s. The United Arab Emirates now get 25% of their electricity from nuclear power. In the year 2019, it was zero. It is possible to implement nuclear reactors at pace, on scale, and on budget. We’ve just lost the ability to do that in Europe and North America.

Big Think: But what about the cost part of the equation? Now nuclear has to compete with wind and solar, which are getting cheaper every year.

Gregory: It depends how you quantify the cost of electricity. The easiest to understand is the levelized cost of electricity. You take how expensive it is to build a piece of power infrastructure, and you divide that by how much energy it produces. So you get the cost per kilowatt-hour. By that metric, it’s true that renewables are getting cheaper.

However, it doesn’t account for the full picture. The purpose of the power supply is not just to produce electricity; it’s to produce electricity exactly when and where you need it. This is where the cost of transmission, the cost of energy storage, and the cost of intermittence have to be factored in. There’s a whole field of study trying to quantify these so-called system costs of electricity. 

When you introduce these system costs to get a fuller picture, you find that the cost of renewables escalates massively, and the costs of nuclear power drops. The reason that nuclear power drops is because it’s incredibly reliable, it’s very easy to get nuclear electricity into the grid, and it lasts a long time. 

Nuclear has the smallest environmental footprint of any power source because of the sheer amount of energy that it produces.

Big Think: You come down hard on wind and solar in the book. You write, “A future of energy scarcity, industrial ­wind-down, and food insecurity lies ahead should we embrace them.”

Yet their immense growth worldwide strongly suggests that a lot of people disagree with you. If a renewable future is so precarious, then why is the world barreling towards it?

Gregory: I think the reason why renewables are so attractive is that they’re easy. They are a good way of starting to wean off fossil fuels. 

The reason that I went after renewables, and perhaps came down hard on them in my book, is that the environmental impact of renewables goes almost completely undiscussed. So many people are so worried about carbon emissions that we tend to forget about other things — such as mineral extraction, land use, and impact on local ecosystems. When you look at renewables on those metrics, they’re not quite as green as the renewable lobby would have you believe. 

Of course, when compared to fossil fuels, they are far better for the environment. But compared to nuclear power, they come up short. Nuclear has the smallest environmental footprint of any power source because of the sheer amount of energy that it produces.

Big Think: Do you think intermittent renewables have a place in a future energy grid?

Gregory: Sure. There are lots of countries that have 10–20% renewables on their grids. But the predictions are that when you have a large share of wind power on your grid, for example, the electricity becomes so unreliable that the price just shoots up. We need reliable, abundant power in society, and renewables just cannot do that. 

A nuclear power plant in Cattenom, France. According to Gregory, thanks to nuclear energy, France has the second least carbon-intensive electricity in Europe and pays less than the EU average for its electricity. (Credit:
Stefan Kühn / Wikimedia Commons)

Big Think: The EU is on track to install a record 89 gigawatts (GW) of renewable capacity in 2025, including 70GW of solar and 19GW of wind. Meanwhile, no new nuclear reactors are planned this year and only a 10GW increase is projected by 2050. 

If you were in charge of energy policy in the EU, what would you advocate instead?

Gregory: I would be encouraging a French-style nuclear rollout that we saw in the past, where they went from essentially no nuclear power to supplying 80% of electricity. France has got the second least carbon-intensive electricity in Europe. All of that clean electricity is a legacy from almost fifty years ago. It’s also worth mentioning that France pays less than the EU average for its electricity, too.

Big Think: You envision a future where small nuclear reactors are nestled into every town and industrial area to provide stable, local power. Will people really want to live next to nuclear power stations?

Gregory: One of the whole points of small modular reactors is that they can fit in places where no traditional reactor can go. AI data centers are what everyone is talking about at the moment, but it goes way beyond that. Steel foundries, food factories, chemical plants, paper mills all currently rely on fossil fuels for the around-the-clock power they need. They could get that from nuclear power.

I also wonder if opposition to nuclear power is overstated. I follow the polls on nuclear power in the UK. More than 50% of people now support nuclear power. Aside from the usual NIMBYism [“not in my backyard”] that plagues all infrastructure projects, I don’t think there’s going to be that much opposition to small modular reactors. 

I think that the first ones will be put far away from urban centers. Then, as they become more routine and more boring, people will forget about them, and they’ll start to move a little closer. I’m optimistic.