Methodological Flaws

The book opens with the story of Mizue, a young girl who lived twenty kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, and her beloved dog, Matsuko, who died after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami resulted in the infamous nuclear accident. Ramana suggests that the pup was killed by radiation exposure but offers no evidence, leaving the reader to infer that the correlation of the two events is also a causal relationship.

This is already a pretty shameless attempt to manipulate the reader’s emotions, but Ramana doubles down, telling us that only a few years later, Mizue was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Again, Ramana offers no evidence of any causal link, but tells us that thyroid cancer is the most common health impact of the nuclear accident, with children particularly affected. In support of this claim, he mentions a study in the journal Epidemiology that found a roughly thirty-fold increase in the number of thyroid cancer cases among Fukushima’s children and adolescents, with more than three hundred residents of all ages similarly diagnosed.

The story of a cancer-stricken girl and her dead puppy is, plainly, emotionally charged. Readers may feel that it’s monstrous to evince skepticism in the face of such claims, which seems to be Ramana’s intention. Nevertheless, it’s important to scrutinize such assertions.

Ramana provides no citation that we can check here, but thankfully, the paper is easy enough to track down. It reports an incidence of ninety-two cancers per million children per year, compared to a baseline incidence of only three cancers per million per year from a 2007 assessment. It sounds devastating.

What Ramana does not mention is that a Japanese government-funded study revealed flaws in the methodology of the cited paper. Normally, as in 2007, there is no population-wide screening for thyroid cancers. Asymptomatic children don’t go to the doctor to get tested, only those who think they have a growth or other abnormal symptoms do. But after the nuclear accident, the prefecture carried out ultrasound scans on a representative sample of the population including these very asymptomatic, healthy kids. The ultrasound detected tiny, slow-growing tumors that would not normally get diagnosed. So, the baseline was wrong.

The other study corrected for this error by comparing the Fukushima incidence to that of ultrasound scans from a representative sample of thousands of children, including asymptomatic kids in three distant prefectures — Aomori, Nagasaki, and Yamanashi. The researchers found that this distant-prefecture control group experienced a similar or slightly increased incidence of thyroid cancer detection compared to the Fukushima group.

In other words, the increased rate of thyroid cancer detection was an artifact of the greater rate of testing from the government’s ultrasound screening campaign, not the nuclear disaster. Such screening programs always find a higher incidence than the non-campaign baseline.

The methodological slipup shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with this particular cancer, which very often goes undiagnosed and is only discovered after death.

Surveys have continued periodically since 2011, including assessments of individuals up to age twenty-five. As of 2022, five such assessments have been conducted and the conclusion remains the same:

Together with the low thyroid absorbed radiation dose estimated in the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) 2020 report, our results suggested that the increased incidence of childhood thyroid cancer in Fukushima Prefecture was not caused by radiation exposure, but rather by the highly sensitive detection method. [Acronym and emphasis added]

Chernobyl Cancers

UNSCEAR, based in Vienna and part of the UN Environment Programme, evaluates risk from ionizing radiation. Its 2020 report found no adverse health effects directly attributable to radiation exposure from the Fukushima incident. The committee’s analysis, which included Japanese experts and international assistance, concluded that radiation levels were too low to cause a discernible increase in cancer rates. There was also no credible evidence of excess congenital anomalies, stillbirths, pre-term deliveries, or low birthweights.

Nobody died, and no one is expected to die or become ill, as a result of radiation exposure.

Ramana concedes that UNSCEAR and other national, regional, and municipal assessments reached similar conclusions, but argues that governments are engaging in a “historically tested strategy” of “denial,” as they are all captured by the nuclear industry. He claims that this conspiracy to cover up deaths and illness includes not just international scientists but also extends across time, citing as proof a single 2002 study that argued there had been a spike in thyroid cancers after the Chernobyl disaster. Ramana also mentions, without citations, studies suggesting excess cancers, heart disease, and congenital malformations around Chernobyl.

But no one actually denies that there was an increase in thyroid cancer among children near the plant after that disaster.

Gerry Thomas, a molecular pathologist and director of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank (CTB), is particularly knowledgeable about thyroid cancer — which unlike many cancers has a very good prognosis as it, quite ironically, responds well to radiation treatment — as well as its assessment techniques, epidemiology, and the Chernobyl meltdown. Thomas was initially drawn to the field because of her own concerns about nuclear energy. The CTB, housed at the US National Cancer Institute with the support of the Ukrainian government, the EU, and the World Health Organization, is a repository of biological material from thousands of people who were exposed as children to radioactive fallout during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Over the decades, more than three dozen studies have been produced using the samples and data from the CTB. These studies, along with other research not reliant on the CTB, have consistently found no evidence for an increase in cancers other than thyroid cancer among those who were children at the time of exposure — even for those living closest to the power station. And, contra Ramana’s claim, as Thomas notes in a paper summarizing the work of the tissue bank, over the following twenty-five years, there were fifteen more deaths from thyroid cancer than would otherwise be expected. The total lifetime excess is predicted to be sixty. And thyroid cancer incidence falls back to normal in anyone born after the radiation had dissipated.

The reason for this is simple: a small number of people were exposed to a high dose of ionizing radiation, while the majority of the affected population were exposed to a low dose. As with any toxin, the dose is what makes the poison. Three people died in the initial reactor explosion and 134 suffered from acute radiation sickness due to exposure to high doses, with twenty-eight of those — all firefighters — dying within a few months.

But beyond this, the 150,000 people living in the most contaminated areas were exposed to a radiation dose of fifty millisieverts (mSv) over the following twenty years, or 2.5 mSv per year — only slightly above the average natural, everyday exposure of 1-2 mSv per year, and less than what one is exposed to in a single CT scan. As Thomas puts it: “Low doses of radiation are far less hazardous than living in a large city or being overweight.” The reason children were more affected is that their thyroids are small and still growing — which increases the risk of damage to cells.

Risk and Hazard

Here we find the first useful lesson from the errors contained in Ramana’s book: the importance of distinguishing between risk and hazard. These two words are commonly used interchangeably, but within epidemiology and toxicology, they have different but related meanings. Hazard is the potential to cause harm. That hazard multiplied by the level of exposure equals the risk of that harm actually happening.

Ramana declares nuclear energy to be “inherently hazardous” but this is meaningless. Everything, even crossing the street and drinking a cup of coffee, is inherently hazardous. Nothing is perfectly safe, i.e., without hazard. Nothing. But the risk posed by coffee-slurping and street-transecting is extremely low. Soy sauce poses the hazard of death from hypernatremia — an excessive concentration of salt in the blood. But the risk of this is ridiculously low, as the volume of soy sauce that must be drunk for this to happen is unrealistically huge. (Nevertheless, some people are tempted to try: in 2013, a man went into a coma after drinking a quart of the stuff).

Ramana however, like most antinuclear activists, rejects this understanding of how harm occurs. He claims that there is no safe dose of radiation. According to him, even minuscule levels of exposure cause harm.

And yet, you don’t have to be an epidemiologist, toxicologist, or expert in radiation to understand how this doesn’t match up to ordinary experience: a dental x-ray clocks in at 0.0005 mSv, the same exposure as eating a 135g bag of Brazil nuts. The possibility of harm — i.e., the hazard — in both cases is identical, yet one instinctively knows that the risk is low. People aren’t going to forgo either due to the risk involved (unless, like me, you’d prefer cashews).

Beer contains a radioactive form of potassium, but far less than what’s in carrot juice (although you don’t need to be concerned about radiation to favor the former over the latter). Now let’s raise the stakes: the average annual dose of ionizing radiation experienced by a nuclear plant worker is only slightly higher than that of an airline passenger taking a transatlantic journey from New York to London and back (because the passenger is closer to space, home to all sorts of ionizing radiation, than on the ground). But neither pose a significant health risk. So, let’s put this ignorant radiophobia to bed. It’s not radiation that’s the problem: it’s what kind and what amount.

To be clear, none of this is to say that the deaths or illness from the Chernobyl disaster were acceptable. None of it was acceptable, but nor was it the necessary consequence of nuclear power. The disaster was solely a product of a corrupt and dying Stalinist regime, not of the technology of nuclear energy itself. By blaming the technology rather than Soviet autocracy is to let the latter off the hook.

What About the Waste?

An increasing number of people readily accept that fears of meltdown are unwarranted. They are familiar with the evidence that shows how safe the operation of nuclear plants outside the USSR has been, and how other forms of energy, from fossil fuels to renewable hydroelectricity — and even wind power, have killed and injured more people. They are aware that we live in a world full of natural radiation from myriad sources, from Brazil nuts, spinach, and bananas to soil, kitty litter, and granite countertops, and even our own bodies. They recognize that the Simpsons’s three-eyed fish in the waters near Springfield nuclear plant is just a cartoon gag. But they remain concerned about the toxic waste that is produced by nuclear energy. Doesn’t it stay extremely dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years?

Ramana repeats this myth, saying that the waste “remains radioactive, and thus hazardous to human health, for hundreds of thousands of years.” Once again, he confuses hazard with risk, failing to understand that radioactivity alone tells us very little without knowing the dose of radiation exposure. But let’s address the core issue: the claim that we are producing large volumes of a substance that will remain highly toxic to humans and the biosphere that we depend upon for a period far longer than the entire existence of civilization.

It’s just not true. And, much like the widely believed claim that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine causes autism, it’s no more true for how often the myth gets repeated.

Let’s consider the facts. First, contrary to Hollywood depiction, nuclear waste is not green glowing ooze; it’s primarily used fuel rods. When spent nuclear fuel has just come out of a reactor, it is indeed extremely radioactive. If you stood next to it without any shielding, you would receive a lethal dose of ionizing radiation within seconds and die a few days later from acute radiation sickness. But it’s never unshielded, and over time, the radioactivity declines. For five to eight years, it is kept in a spent fuel pool — a literal pool of water — until the radiation levels decline to the point that it can be stored in dry casks without the need for such shielding.

The kernel of truth to the myth is that even though the radioactivity quickly drops off and continues to decline over time, the spent fuel does not decline to a benign state for thousands of years. What is termed high-level waste (HLW) decays to the level of radioactivity of the uranium mineral ore — which is only weakly radioactive and safe to hold in your hand (although not to eat) — after one thousand to ten thousand years. So, not hundreds of thousands of years, but still a very long time.

However, most waste is actually just spent fuel, much of which can be recycled to produce new fuel, reducing the volume of HLW by about 85 percent. France, China, Russia, and Japan already do this. The technique is called Plutonium Uranium Reduction Extraction (PUREX). It removes the by-products of the spent fuel from uranium and plutonium, which can then be reused as new fuel.

Ramana dismisses PUREX because even though it radically reduces the volume of waste, it doesn’t eliminate it completely. What remains still has to be dealt with. In addition, the PUREX method produces small quantities of very pure plutonium, which could potentially increase the chance of nuclear weapons proliferation.

But PUREX is not the only recycling method. Another technique, pyroprocessing, does not isolate pure plutonium. Better yet, the waste remaining after the process declines to the radioactivity level of uranium mineral ore after just three hundred years. Although pyroprocessing is a proven technique, it is not yet used on a commercial scale because it leaves some impurities in the new fuel it produces, making it unsuitable for the current reactor fleet. A new type of reactor, a “fast reactor” — such as those under construction in India, China, and Russia — will be able to use this fuel, effectively closing the fuel cycle.

It’s important to note that the toxicity of other industrial waste, such as those from heavy metals used in the production of some types of solar panels, many types of batteries, and produced in battery recycling, does not decline over time. Wind turbines also have a disposal problem, as their fiberglass blades — which can be as big as 747 wings — can’t be recycled and are often simply buried.

We should be very careful to avoid becoming the reverse of antinuclear activists like Ramana by overstating problems or demonizing solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines. They are all as essential to the clean transition as nuclear power. Not all solar panels contain such substances and the US Environmental Protection Agency is currently developing rules to ensure that end-of-life renewable waste is dealt with appropriately.

I bring this up only to underscore the reality of trade-offs. There is no clean energy option free of any hazard. Beyond nuclear and renewable waste, there are hundreds of industrial processes that result in the production of nasty substances. Mercury, cyanide, arsenic, and other industrial wastes are regularly placed in geological repositories — in essence returning a toxic substance back to where it came from. Remember that beneath the surface, all sorts of toxic substances can be found completely naturally.

In fact, in 1972, in Oklo, Gabon, a “natural nuclear reactor” was discovered deep underground. This deposit of uranium began fissioning 1.7 billion years ago, generating “nuclear waste” for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet all that waste has remained securely contained, far removed from the biosphere, until today.

Ventriloquizing Indigenous Opposition

Another of Ramana’s key concerns is the danger posed by uranium mining, which he claims is responsible for “contaminating land and water around the world, especially in areas occupied by indigenous communities.” This argument is often repeated by antinuclear activists, but few ever visit northern Saskatchewan — home to the world’s largest high-grade uranium deposits — to ask what First Nations people there actually think. This area in Canada produces roughly a quarter of the world’s uranium supply, and most residents are of indigenous heritage.

The kernel of truth about Ramana’s narrative stems from the racist, colonial, and anti-union practices of uranium mining in the 1930s and 1940s, including the dumping of uranium tailings into Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. But such practices were not unique to uranium mining. They were widespread across all mining sectors and industries of the time.

As a result of decades of indigenous and trade union struggle, uranium mining in Saskatchewan today has strong health, safety, and environmental standards. The jobs are unionized by the United Steelworkers and provide high-paid, family-supporting, community-maintaining work. Uranium mining thus represents the largest industrial employer of indigenous people in the country. Beyond the miners themselves, the independent Northern Saskatchewan Environmental Quality Committee (NSEQC) — composed entirely of indigenous representatives elected by their communities — monitors the environmental impact of the industry.

The struggle against anti-indigenous racism and colonial theft is far from over. A good step forward in this regard would be to not press-gang entire peoples into supporting one’s argument. There are First Nations people in the province, particularly the miners themselves, who do not consider uranium mining to be a colonial imposition, still less, as Ramana describes their condition, a “sacrifice zone.” These individuals instead view the mines as a source of economic development after generations of poverty and inequality caused by colonial oppression. In fact, leaders such as Chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) has repeatedly stated his organization’s worries that closure of US nuclear plants, driven by antinuclear campaigns, will result in layoffs.

It is true that there are also antinuclear activists who are indigenous, but to say that the latter are the authentic voices of First Nations while discounting those indigenous voices who back uranium mining is simply to replicate the colonial logic of favoring whichever indigenous group happens to align with one’s position. We cannot say “indigenous people oppose uranium mining,” as they are as divided on the question as everybody else.

Nuclear Reactors Cannot Be Turned Into Nuclear Bombs

Ultimately, Ramana’s concerns about health and environmental impacts are secondary to the issue he says drove him to oppose nuclear power in the first place: nuclear weapons and their proliferation. He is particularly exercised about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. This concern echoes a view expressed by Berlin-based journalist Paul Hockenos in an antinuclear article in the the Nation, which claimed that the fighting around the Zaporizhzhia plant is “weaponizing” its reactors.

First, it’s important to clarify that nuclear reactors are not nuclear bombs and cannot be converted into them. They do both use the word “nuclear” in their name, but nuclear plants are fundamentally different than nuclear weapons, much like they are different from nuclear medicine.

But what if a missile accidentally or deliberately hit the plant? Let’s remember that if a missile hit, say, a hydroelectric dam or an ammonia storage facility — both essential in any decarbonized economy, including Ramana’s desired nuclear-free, 100 percent renewable energy system — there would be profound human devastation.

The most deadly electricity-related disaster of all time was the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao hydroelectric dam in China, which, along with sixty-one other dams in the region, resulted in the deaths of as many as 230,000 people (which is according to a Human Rights Watch assessment; the Communist Party of China claims the true figure is one-tenth of that). This disaster was caused by a typhoon and compounded by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, but a country at war could target a dam to cause similar devastation. Should we therefore abandon hydroelectric energy? (As it turns out, Ramana’s position also calls for the elimination of large-scale hydro, but this is an unusual position to take, as most 100 percent renewables scenarios depend on a colossal increase in generation from large-scale hydroelectricity and buildout of pumped-storage hydro systems).

One of the deadliest industrial accidents in recent history was the 2020 explosion at a Beirut port storage facility for ammonium nitrate (used for fertilizer), which killed more than 220 and left 300,000 homeless. In a war scenario, such a facility could be targeted by military forces. By Ramana’s logic, this raises the question: Should we then ban fertilizer?

It’s worth noting that, even if a missile were to strike a nuclear plant, the used fuel is solid metal, encased in steel and concrete. It’s not flammable or water-soluble. It cannot be vaporized or explode.

Regarding the potential use of waste as a dirty bomb, HLW is vitrified — converted into glass — which makes it very hard to disperse through an explosion and vaporization. According to a 2002 National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report, the casualty rates from a dirty bomb would be very low. Terrorists would likely find simpler, more effective methods for causing harm rather than dealing with the complexities of nuclear waste.

If a hostile actor wanted to cause maximum damage, directing missiles at a nuclear plant would be pretty ineffective. The main threat to human life from a military attack on a nuclear plant would be from the disruption of electricity.

For Ramana, however, the primary concern is that nuclear energy development is inextricably linked to nuclear bombs. He argues that both depend on the same nuclear science and that the technical inputs, resources, and personnel are interchangeable: “The infrastructure to produce nuclear electricity also offers the technical capacity to advance the ability of countries to make nuclear weapons materials.” While some reactors, such as the Canadian CANDU reactor, do not require enriched uranium, many do. Ramana notes that if a country can enrich uranium to reactor-grade, then it doesn’t take much more effort to enrich it to weapons-grade.

Despite this, out of the thirty-two countries that employ nuclear power, only nine have nuclear weapons programs. Furthermore, some NATO members, such as Italy and Turkey host nuclear weapons but do not operate nuclear power plants.

Enriching uranium to weapons-grade is more complex than Ramana suggests. Not every country enriches its own uranium, as the centrifuge process is highly specialized, requiring complex, capital-intensive equipment. Currently, only three large commercial enrichment producers exist. Because of the strategic sensitivity of enrichment, the inputs, equipment, personnel, and firms involved are all very tightly monitored by nonproliferation authorities.

The situation is different for plutonium. The reactors for the production of plutonium are very different from those used for generation of electricity. This is because unintentionally producing plutonium with significant proportions of the wrong isotope of plutonium (i.e., with the wrong number of neutrons), makes the material extremely unpredictable and thus dangerous for the bomb-makers themselves.

Nevertheless, yet again, there’s a kernel of truth to Ramana’s concern, but ridding the world of nuclear energy will do nothing to solve the underlying problem. It’s true that nuclear weapons and nuclear energy (and, for that matter, nuclear medicine) all rely on the same fundamental science. But Pandora’s Box has been opened. There’s no way that humanity can unlearn what it has learned. If a country really wants to develop the bomb and has wealth enough to do so, it can pursue nuclear weapons regardless of the status of nuclear energy. The real barrier is political: Canada does not have nuclear weapons because Canadians have democratically decided that they do not want them, not because it lacks the capability to build one.

Similarly, the science and engineering required to produce ammonia for synthetic fertilizers are nearly identical to that which was needed to produce ammonia in order to manufacture explosives and munitions in World War I. The same is true for hydrogen cyanide, which can be used as a low-environmental-impact fumigant pesticide, or, under the brand name Zyklon B, exterminate millions of Central European Jews. Attempting to ban nuclear energy while ignoring the political and economic factors that drive the need for nuclear weapons is setting ourselves up for failure.

Doesn’t It Take Too Long and Cost Too Much?

In recent years, as global awareness of climate change has grown, a raft of high-profile climate scientists, environmental campaigners, left-wing intellectuals, and progressive political leaders — including many Jacobin writers — have shifted from opposing nuclear power to embracing it. This change is not only because previous concerns about radiation, meltdowns, and waste have been shown to be unsupported by evidence, but also because a world without nuclear power cannot solve the climate challenge.

An electric grid cannot maintain reliability with variable and intermittent energy (VRE) sources like wind and solar alone. We need consistent power to run essential services like ventilators and incubators, without waiting for the sun to shine or the wind to blow. While batteries can store energy, they cannot provide long-duration storage for periods when neither wind nor solar energy is available for weeks on end. And so, to ensure grid reliability, we need “firm” resources — those that are available whenever needed — to complement VRE.

There are three clean and firm resources: hydroelectricity, geothermal, and nuclear. Biomass is another firm option, and it is renewable, but it isn’t always low-carbon. In principle, natural gas with carbon, capture, and storage (CCS) could also be a clean(ish) and firm resource, but this technology has yet to be widely implemented.

Hydroelectricity and geothermal energy are fantastic options where available. The electricity grids of British Columbia, Quebec, and Norway — and a small handful of other locations — with their bounty of mountain valleys and rivers that can be dammed, are almost completely low-carbon thanks to hydroelectricity. In these areas, an effectively 100 percent renewable system has already been achieved, with as yet no need for nuclear. British Columbia, located in a very geologically active part of the planet, will likely make considerable use of geothermal energy. But hydroelectric and geothermal resources are highly geographically constrained. This means, in many places in the world, nuclear power remains a necessary option to complement VRE.

In response to the growing acceptance of nuclear by many former critics, antinuclear activists have shifted their focus from concerns about radiation, meltdowns, and waste to highlighting cost-overruns and delays associated with recent nuclear construction projects. Ramana’s chapter on these concerns is valuable as it consolidates detailed complaints around cost and scheduling that were previously scattered across social media and environmental NGO briefings.

Ramana specifically points to the apparent project boondoggles of Flamanville in France, Hinkley Point C in the UK, and most egregious of all, Vogtle Generating Station units 3 and 4 in Georgia. The Vogtle project’s costs ballooned from an initial estimate of $14 billion to $34 billion by the time that the novel AP1000 reactors were connected to the grid in 2023 and 2024. Ramana cites a survey by fellow antinuclear activist Benjamin Sovacool that found that out of 180 nuclear projects, only five were completed within their original budget and on schedule.

Ramana also cites a 2021 assessment of the “levelized cost of electricity” (LCOE), a metric developed by French energy consultancy Lazard, which shows that the average cost per megawatt-hour (MWh) of energy produced by utility-scale solar (i.e., a solar farm rather than rooftop solar) is about five times less than the average cost per MWh from newly built nuclear ($34/MWh vs. $168/MWh).

Worse even than cost issues are the repeated delays as the drumbeats of climate change grow ever louder. We are running out of time. Ramana’s colleague Mycle Schneider of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report — an annually produced document that sounds like it’s an official publication of the industry itself but is actually put out by an antinuclear campaign group — concludes that the average construction time for a nuclear project is ten years. Given the need to drastically reduce emissions by 2030 and eliminate them by 2050, Ramana argues that we don‘t have (less than) a decade to wait.

However, even if Ramana and Schneider’s claims were accurate, they don’t address the fundamental problem of wind and solar energy’s intermittency. Long-duration energy storage options such as pumped-storage hydro, underground compressed air, or gravity storage (essentially stacking blocks and dropping them) are geographically constrained or inadequate for the energy required.

For instance, the 25 MW/100 MWh Energy Vault in Rudong, China — the world’s first gravity storage option — is the size of a skyscraper and provides just four hours of storage. To ensure reliability during those occasions that VRE is unavailable for weeks would require the construction of colossal amounts of energy storage that in many places would hardly ever be used — but would still need to be there just in case. “Overbuilding” wind and solar resources to cover large areas (where wind may be blowing elsewhere) still requires significant infrastructure to connect up these resources with a lot more transmission lines. This is called “firming VRE.” Although, to be clear, such firming only reduces the problem of unreliability; it doesn’t solve it. But if there is clean firm power at least somewhere in the mix, this reduces the need to build these firming resources — expensive, rarely called upon long-duration storage, overbuild, and extra transmission.

This means that when Ramana claims that wind and solar are now the cheapest electricity options, he is comparing apples to oranges. A tent is a much cheaper option for shelter than a house, but there is a reason that we all don’t live in tents. Wind and solar don’t provide the same services that firm electricity resources do because they aren’t available whenever we need them.

Germany vs. France: A Tale of Two Energy Strategies

It is for this reason that Lazard became frustrated over the years by antinuclear activists using their LCOE metric to compare tents to houses. To address this, in 2023, Lazard developed a new metric, “LCOE+,” to accurately compare the costs of different firm electricity options and the cost of firming intermittency.

Lazard’s LCOE+, which Ramana does not mention, shows that even the Vogtle’s $125/MWh is cheaper than firmed solar ($141/MWh) in sunny California and of firmed wind there ($132/MWh). In China, where new nuclear costs about $63/MWh, we see how competitive nuclear really can be. This doesn’t mean that every location needs nuclear. One of the most important things to understand about cleaning up the grid is that there is no one-size-fits-all energy mix — different locations have different geographical attributes. As we have seen, some places can rely on 100 percent renewables with other firm sources for reliability. However, in a great many places, nuclear remains necessary. The only remaining debate is about levels of necessity.

The real-world comparison between France and Germany illustrates this. Expanding its fleet in the late 1970s, France decarbonized most of its grid through a public sector nuclear buildout for about the equivalent of €100 billion by the early 1980s. Right next door, Germany’s “Energiewende” transition to wind, solar, and biomass has cost more than €500 billion, yet its grid is roughly six times more carbon intensive than its neighbor’s and its electricity prices are about a third higher. Germany’s high energy prices are bludgeoning its economy and even leading to deindustrialization.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that roughly since the late 1980s, nuclear plant cost overruns and delays have been common, especially in the West. Even a more objective analysis than Schneider’s, conducted by Hannah Ritchie of Oxford University’s Our World in Data project, concludes that the global median construction time clocks in at 6.3 years, with a global mean of 7.5 years.

The causes for these delays are numerous and complex. Constant regulatory changes during construction, often driven by successful antinuclear campaigns and the appointment of activists’ allies to regulatory bodies, are a major factor. Long pauses following events like Chernobyl, 9/11, and Fukushima, as well as the effects of neoliberal energy-sector liberalization, have also contributed.

For example, in 2009, a post-9/11 ruling by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) required nuclear builds in Georgia and South Carolina to alter the containment building in order to withstand airplane strikes even though the NRC itself believed that this was not necessary to ensure adequate protection. Each day that construction is halted adds to the project’s costs, with interest payments, contractor fees, and workers’ wages continuing to accumulate. Frequent design changes further exacerbate delays by preventing the learning curve from lowering costs, which typically comes from repeating the same tasks.

We should also recognize that all sorts of large-scale infrastructure projects in the West, from high-speed rail to offshore wind suffer from many of the same delays and eye-watering, multibillion-dollar cost overruns. The West just isn’t very good at building big stuff anymore.

In contrast, some countries, particularly China, South Korea, and Japan, have managed to build nuclear plants much faster, often within three to five years, according to Ritchie’s analysis. The four-unit Barakah generating station in the United Arab Emirates, built by South Korea’s publicly owned Kepco, began construction in 2012 and the fourth unit was online earlier this year, averaging about three years per unit.

It’s also important to understand that 2030 is not an absolute deadline for building all clean energy infrastructure. The world will not end on January 1, 2031. Even 2050 is not the deadline, as we will continue to be building new generating capacity for the rest of this century, particularly in the Global South. But it is true that we cannot afford to delay nuclear development any longer by claiming that we don’t have time to build it.

In 2009, Ed Miliband, the energy and climate secretary of Gordon Brown’s UK Labour government, announced ten sites for new nuclear, which would have been the most ambitious fleet of such plants in Europe. However, Brown lost the 2010 election, and the incoming Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition scotched the plans as part of their imposition of fiscal austerity, with neither leader backing the technology. Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said that nuclear took too long, noting that the plants would not be operational until the distant future of 2021 or 2022.

As antinuclear sentiment repeatedly prevails, the sector suffers a decay of supply chains, loss of expertise, and an exodus of trained personnel, all of which drives up costs and adds to delays. Each delay imposed on nuclear buildout imposed by antinuclear activists, and their allies in government, is a delay to achieving net-zero emissions that is every bit as deadly as the obstructions put up by the fossil industry.

Antinuclear Ideology Is Not the Solution

If nuclear is not the solution, what does Ramana propose?

Ramana not only opposes nuclear, but also dismisses large-scale hydroelectricity due to its “sizable impacts” on the environment. This leaves him with only one clean firm energy option: the geographically limited geothermal. He advocates for “geographical diversity,” optimistically noting that if the wind isn’t blowing in Germany, “it could be blowing in Spain.”

But what happens when it isn’t?

He also supports energy storage, “from lithium-ion batteries to pumped storage of water.” However, it’s unclear why he considers large-scale conventional hydro reservoirs unacceptable while endorsing large-scale pumped-storage-hydro reservoirs. Even so, he appears to concede that storage technologies alone are not sufficient: “How much these storage technologies can economically contribute to enhancing the reliability of the grid is a question for the future.”

Instead, Ramana places his faith in demand response — incentivizing consumers to shift their electricity use to when VRE is plentiful — and degrowth. However, he acknowledges that using price signals for this purpose would disproportionally impact poorer households, so he suggests focusing these signals on commercial and industrial sectors.

Unfortunately, while it is certainly true that there are commercial and industrial sectors that produce goods and services of limited social utility, many sectors, like those producing medicines, food, and vehicles, are vitally socially useful. Industry is not some alien, unwanted imposition upon the populace. Moreover, this approach still doesn’t solve the problem of what to do when renewable energy is unavailable, and there is substantial demand from poorer households. Ramana just hand-waves this issue away.

Another antinuclear partisan, Rutgers anthropology professor and author of another Verso book on renewable energy, David McDermott Hughes, has recognized this incongruency and confronts it head on. He concedes that if we give up both fossil fuels and nuclear power (and presumably large-scale hydro, too), it will indeed be difficult if not impossible to maintain a reliable grid. However, Hughes argues that this isn’t a problem — it’s a solution. He suggest that society needs to simply stop expecting constant electr icity. Rather, Zimbabwe and Puerto Rico, home to regular interruptions to the power supply, provide models of “just and feasible ways of living amid intermittency.”

This is where Ramana’s call for degrowth comes in. Even wind and solar “are no panacea,” he writes, because, like fossil fuels and nuclear power, they require material inputs mined in places like the Congo and South America. To limit the environmental impact of energy production, we must abandon economic growth, although how this solves the intermittency problem is left unanswered.

This one-sided focus on the costs of action without considering the costs of inaction runs throughout Ramana’s book. His priority is proving why nuclear is no solution, not in proposing what could be a solution. He emphasizes the cost of doing something but totally neglects the cost of not doing it.

This mode of thinking, which ignores the unavoidable trade-offs involved in any decision, is common in much conventional environmentalism. Yet there is no world with zero negative impacts, no eco-utopia — we must instead choose the world with the least such impacts. For example, we must phase down fossil fuel combustion as rapidly as possible in order to avoid dangerous global warming. But if we get rid of all fossil fuel production immediately — as Just Stop Oil campaigners demand — industrial civilization would quickly grind to a halt, killing billions, which is the very result we seek to avoid through the phase down of fossil fuels. So, we must continue fossil fuel production, albeit with forms of economic planning, such as industrial policy, to mitigate the irrationalities of market incentives and accelerate the phase-down, even though this will result in some unwanted warming. This is the unavoidable trade-off.

Nuclear Needs Exposure to a Dose of Socialism

There is an irony in the relationship between economic planning and nuclear energy. Beyond the regulatory obstructionism won by antinuclear campaigners, one of the biggest barriers to successfully deploying a new fleet of reactors — capable of assisting renewables in decarbonizing the global economy — has been the liberalization of electricity markets.

Due to the high up-front capital costs of conventional large-scale nuclear plants — similar to those of hydro dams — market actors are often reluctant to invest without significant government support, outside of publicly owned power companies and regulated, vertically integrated utilities. The financial risk is too great. Historically, this is why nuclear plants have been built by the public sector or by regulated utilities. The fastest decarbonization in history was the French government’s entirely statist nuclearization of its grid.

It is not just that socialists must embrace nuclear energy; nuclear energy needs to embrace socialism.

And over the last four decades, privatization, the unbundling of generation from transmission and distribution, erosion of public ownership, Byzantine auction processes, excessive debt constraints on public agencies, and other neoliberal policies have made nuclear even less attractive, while fragilizing our grid. The good news is that in the United States, the Biden administration’s pivot away from neoliberalism — abandoning conventional market-based climate policy like carbon pricing and NGO-friendly renewables-only approaches — has led to a technology-inclusive industrial policy. This includes the climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, both of which strongly support nuclear energy.

These government incentives aim to de-risk nuclear and other clean technologies such as batteries, electric vehicles, advanced geothermal (thus expanding its geographical footprint), carbon removal, and clean hydrogen. The policies also seek to expand state capacity, stabilize supply chains, reform permitting (to overcome NIMBY barriers), and, crucially, reindustrialize in a way that creates high-paying jobs while making it easier for workers to unionize, ensuring a just transition for fossil fuel workers. There’s a reason industrial labor has been so enthusiastic for Biden’s policies.

Bidenomics is a strong, post-neoliberal start for climate policy and much more, but it doesn’t go far enough. The focus remains on tax credits (albeit usable by non-tax-paying public agencies) rather than a muscular expansion of public ownership. Expanding the capacity of existing public agencies such as the Tennessee Valley Authority — by lifting debt ceilings and authorizing it to build out clean energy across the country — could truly deliver the long-awaited nuclear renaissance. This is before any discussion of getting serious about the vast sums required for serious climate finance to enable faster, broader clean tech infrastructure deployment in the Global South.

Moreover, this moment of post-neoliberalism remains very fragile. While the sheer economic weight of the United States has pushed the EU, Canada, and others to adopt some elements of industrial policy, these are often watered down and face significant political opposition. Industrial policy remains largely limited to the United States, apart from China’s own state-directed market economy.

It’s still quite vague what sort of economic policies a Kamala Harris administration might adopt, and a Donald Trump administration’s presumed tax cuts would hobble necessary spending. Even more importantly, the IRA and associated bills were passed in a unique moment: the need for significant stimulus in the wake of a devastating pandemic. Such opportunities are unlikely to come again. Continued opposition to nuclear by much of the climate left — as well as other counterproductive and deeply unpopular positions such as degrowth, opposition to aviation, meat, and mining, and maximalist stances against cars, even electric vehicles — makes it even less likely that the IRA can be strengthened with future legislation.

If we want to speed up decarbonization while delivering a prosperous, high-energy, egalitarian reindustrialization that will heal the economic wound that has driven the rise of global Trumpism, the Left must abandon outdated, evidence-free 1970s antinuclear ideology, neo-Malthusian degrowth rhetoric, and other eco-austerity politics. It is an insult to the millions of Americans who are living paycheck to paycheck to be told by middle-class intellectuals that they consume too much. Instead, climate activists need to align with the industrial trade unions on the front lines of the clean energy transition, which strongly support nuclear energy and industrial policy for the high-quality, unionizable jobs they provide.

Antinuclear politics, along with its technophobia, and antipathy toward industry, has been a colossal mistake. It’s time we return to the classic socialist, technology-positive stance of figures like Karl Marx, Sylvia Pankhurst, Leon Trotsky, and Harold Wilson. We need to rediscover the Left’s commitment to defending industrial modernity against counter-Enlightenment nostalgia and promising a far superior industrial modernity than capitalism could ever deliver.