IEA Official Says Green Goals Doomed Without Nuclear

If you’re an environmentalist, make sure you’re sitting down for this: the world is going to need nuclear power if it has any chance at reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the levels deemed necessary by scientists to stave off catastrophic global warming. That’s what the International Energy Agency (IEA) said this week, when it cautioned that the coming scheduled decommissioning of an entire generation of nuclear reactors in the West is threatening the global effort to curtail emissions. Reuters reports:

Nuclear is now the largest low-carbon power source in Europe and the United States, about three times bigger than wind and solar combined, according to IEA data. But most reactors were built in the 1970s and early 80s, and will reach the end of their life around 2020. […]

[Governments] must expand renewable investments to replace old nuclear plants if they are to meet decarbonization targets, IEA Chief Economist Laszlo Varro told Reuters. “The ageing of the nuclear fleet is a considerable challenge for energy security and decarbonization objectives,” he said on the sidelines of the Eurelectric utilities conference in Portugal. […]

“If we do not keep nuclear in the energy mix and do not accelerate wind and solar deployment, the loss of nuclear capacity will knock us back by 15 to 20 years. We do not have that much time to lose,” he said.

This won’t come as any great surprise to those familiar with the unique merits of nuclear power—next to hydroelectricity, it’s the only source of zero-emissions baseload power. Unlike wind and solar power, the typical green energy darlings, nuclear can be relied upon to keep the lights on 24/7, independent of the vagaries of daily weather. Simply put, nuclear reactors are the green energy workhorses upon which any sort of future sustainable energy mix must be built.

And yet, we’re seeing fear mongering greens getting their way in countries like France, where newly-elected president Emmanuel Macron’s pick for energy minister is intent on dismantling the country’s massive fleet of nuclear reactors (which account for roughly three quarters of France’s electricity).

Here in the United States, our own reactors are quickly reaching the end of their life cycles, and there aren’t any new plants coming down the pipeline to replace them. When they retire, they won’t be replaced by wind or solar power—intermittent renewables can’t be substituted for the baseload power nuclear contributes. Instead, it will be fossil fuels like coal or natural gas stepping up to the plate, and they’ll be emitting greenhouse gases in the process.

There are a host of new nuclear technologies that could form the backbone of the next generation of reactors, but policymakers aren’t pursuing them with enough urgency. Nuclear power is as good for global energy security as it is for climate change mitigation. We might not realize how important these reactors are until they’re gone.

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