Enabling a Nuclear Revival—And Managing Its Risks

Abstract

As John Holdren points out in the introduction to this Innovations special issue, the world will need to produce huge quantities of energy in the 21 st century to meet the needs of a growing world population, while also working to lift billions of people out of poverty. Providing this energy at a reasonable cost, without causing unmanageable climate disruption, security risks, or other environmental devastation, will be one of the century's most daunting challenges. This challenge will be even more difficult to meet if nuclear energy does not play a substantial part. But achieving the scale of nuclear energy growth required while managing the risks of that growth will be a major challenge in itself, one that will require both technical and institutional innovations. Consider the scale of growth that is needed for nuclear energy to make a meaningful contribution to mitigating carbon emissions. One oft-cited 2004 analysis broke down the problem of shifting away from a business-as-usual energy path into seven "wedges"-different technologies that would each grow to displace a billion tons of carbon emissions per year by 2050 (see Figure 1). 1 More recent science suggests that 10 to 15 such wedges are likely to be required, as business-asusual emissions are higher than previously projected, the carbon-absorbing properties of the oceans appear to be weaker, and the atmospheric concentration of carbon required to avoid disastrous climate consequences seem to be even lower than once thought. For nuclear power to provide even one such wedge would require a

Expert Judgments about RD&D and the Future of Nuclear Energy

“…Growth has been constrained by high costs and a variety of political, regulatory, and public acceptance challenges, which are likely to be exacerbated by the reaction to the Fukushima accident in Japan. For nuclear power to displace a billion tons of carbon a year by 2050, roughly a tenth of what is likely to be needed to meet the internationally agreed goal of limiting global average temperature increases to 2°C above preindustrial levels, would require adding 25 large nuclear plants to the grid every year from now until 2050 . This means nuclear energy would have to become much more attractive to those making decisions about what types of power plants to build than it was in the decade before the Fukushima disaster.…”