Deep Dive
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Nuclear power is back in favour across the world amid efforts to cut carbon emissions by using reactors to generate electricity alongside renewable sources. I'm Russell Padmore, and in the first of two editions of Business Daily about atomic power, I'll examine why more countries are investing in an industry which has been considered expensive and
Japan is recommissioning mothball reactors and plans to build new ones. Japan cannot really function well without the use of nuclear power plants in addition to fossil fuels and hydro-
hydroelectric power plants. More than 60 nuclear power stations are planned or under construction in Asia, Europe and North America, the industry's biggest expansion since the 1990s. But should investment be directed towards renewable sources instead of nuclear? We have run out of time to address the climate crisis. We can't afford to mess around with technologies that don't actually do what we need them to do.
And the vice president of Microsoft explains why technology companies are investing in nuclear power. Even more renewable energy is very important. But at the same time, we think nuclear is a very vital addition and supplement and complement, especially as we see the needs of AI that are in the near term. Business Daily and the renewed growth of the nuclear industry. A uranium bullet fired down a barrel into a uranium tank.
Together they started a nuclear chain reaction, releasing untold quantities of energy.
A BBC drama recreating the devastating atom bomb attack on Japan, which hastened the end of the Second World War. It's estimated more than 200,000 were killed by two bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Scientists who worked on the secret Manhattan Project to create such a devastating bomb would later see some of their research used for developing nuclear power to generate electricity in the 1950s.
A new landmark rises at Pleasanton. It is the nation's first privately financed and operated atomic power plant. Reactors were built by many countries beyond the US, such as France, China, Japan, Russia and the UK. But accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and concerns about storing nuclear waste turned many against the industry. However, nuclear power is being seen as a good way to reduce carbon emissions, and the
and the industry predicts significant new investment. China is outpacing the United States by at least a decade in developing nuclear power. Africa's nuclear race is heating up. Countries across the continent want to expand access to electricity. There are currently four nuclear power plants that are operational in Canada. They are the first nuclear reactors built from scratch in the U.S. in more than 30 years.
Many countries are planning to build dozens of new plants, but could that be at the expense of investing in renewable sources of electricity? Sama Bilbao-Ileon, the Director General of the World Nuclear Association, says reactors are cost-effective. Nuclear electricity is definitely competitive and cheaper than other energy sources, including carbon-free energy sources, particularly if you consider the entire costs involved.
A nuclear power plant will operate probably for 60, 80, 100 years. The United States was a leader in nuclear technology alongside the UK, France and Russia. But has the industry pivoted much more towards Asia, with China and Japan too, either building more reactors or, in the case of Japan, recommissioning plants which were mothballed?
Well, clearly, there's been a lot of emphasis in nuclear energy in Asia, for sure. China, like India, like South Korea, Japan, they not only have continued or used nuclear energy in their energy mix, but they have also put a lot of emphasis in their industrial infrastructure.
Can the industry build reactors quick enough to match the other renewable competitors? Yes. The average of the construction time for a nuclear power plant globally is about 5.6 years. Public opinion on nuclear is definitely becoming much more positive. And this is particularly true in younger generations.
A major earthquake has hit Japan where tsunami has engulfed part of the region. In 2011, the dangers of nuclear facilities were highlighted by an earthquake and tsunami, which caused a meltdown of reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan. The disaster turned the country against atomic power.
But 14 years on, the government in Tokyo has reversed that policy. Plants that were mothballed are being recommissioned, alongside plans to build new reactors. So why is nuclear back in favour? Yuichiro Nakajima is the managing director of Crimson Phoenix, a corporate advisory firm on investment in Japan. Japan cannot really function well without nuclear.
the use of nuclear power plants in addition to fossil fuels and hydroelectric power plants. And that sort of gradual shift has culminated in the more or less wholesale removal of various restrictions on energy
Construction of new plants, the recommissioning of existing plants and also of the lifespan that is permitted for any existing power plant. But I wonder how the Japanese people had a change of heart about the risk of nuclear power and bear in mind that Fukushima meltdown was 2011, that's not really long ago.
It came about after much soul-searching, the current context of trying to reduce greenhouse gases and secure or increase energy security. The future for Japan, renewable sources for generating electricity, wind turbines, solar panels, as well as nuclear? Completely, yes.
You know, there are lots of solar panels on disused golf courses, for example. We should be able to use more wind power. The target is for nuclear power to supply 20% of total demand. Yuichiro Nakajima from Crimson Phoenix. You're listening to Business Daily from the BBC World.
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I'm Russell Padmore, examining the renewed growth of the nuclear power industry. Atomic power is not universally popular. Those anti-nuclear protesters in Germany in 1995 eventually saw their campaign become successful.
By 2023, the Germans have closed down their last three reactors. Carsten Jeske, the chief economist at ING in Frankfurt, says public opinion was influenced by the meltdown at the Fukushima plant in Japan. There was eventually an emotional decision by the back then Merkel government in 2011 as a result or as a reaction to the Fukushima disaster accident in Japan.
Now, closing down nuclear plants, banning coal power, hasn't that created a bigger reliance on using gas for Germany? And with Russia, one of the major suppliers of natural gas, hasn't that created a problem for German industry since the war in Ukraine? Oh, definitely. But then you should step up the move towards renewable energy. The pace with which Germany then introduced and invested in renewable energies was not fast enough.
They went back to coal and they also started to import more LNG from Middle East countries but also from the US. Germany might have stopped using nuclear power but it still imports electricity from France where nuclear plants are a big part of power generation.
There is too much of an ideology. You cannot say that you are stepping out of nuclear and then still imported from France. But actually, not even only from France. They also imported nuclear energy from Czech Republic, for example.
This path towards getting completely renewable had been a very tough one and still not one that has been finished successfully. Karsten Jeske at ING in Frankfurt. Many countries are seeing nuclear as part of a mix, along with renewable sources like solar panels and wind turbines to generate electricity. Naomi Oreskes, IWG.
Professor of science at Harvard University, insists nuclear power is expensive, dangerous and its reliability is a myth. The first civilian nuclear power plant was built in 1954 in Pennsylvania. And what we know about this technology is that it has a proven track record of over-promising and under-delivering. We have run out of time to address the climate crisis. We can't afford to mess around with technologies that don't actually do what we need them to do.
If nuclear electricity is more expensive to generate power than other sources of getting electricity, why are so many countries opting to invest in building reactors then? There's a lot of hype, resurgence of conversation around nuclear and a few very prominent individuals like Bill Gates who have really got on board with trying to push the idea that this is the solution.
If you actually look at how many new nuclear power plants have been built around the world in the last 10 years, it's like almost none. So there's the talk and then there's the reality. What do you make of countries extended the permitted or the licensed working life of their reactors?
Most people who are close to this issue understand that existing reactors that are operating safely should continue to operate and continue to make the contributions they do make to a low carbon profile. But in terms of rapidly expanding our low carbon energy sources, there are other sources that are better, safer and cheaper.
It's a windy day here in the hills and mountains of Donegal in the northwest of Ireland. I have a great view of forests and the scenic Bluestack Mountains, and I'm also in the shadow of 18 tall and imposing wind turbines. Cullia Wind Farm here was Ireland's first wind power project to be fully funded by private investment, and it's been operating here since 2008.
Ireland generates a third of its electricity from wind turbines like these, an industry that seemed like science fiction in the 1970s when the government decided its future should be nuclear.
But stiff resistance from the public and protests against building a reactor in the southeast of the country forced the government to scrap the idea. In 1999, Ireland passed a law to ban the production of electricity from nuclear fission. But two years ago, the government signed an agreement to build a subsea cable connecting the island to France, which means importing electricity generated from French nuclear power.
So has Irish resistance to nuclear changed? And going down the mountain into the biggest town in the region, Letakennie, to get some opinions. I don't know, I'd be more for wind power and solar, which seems like the easy way. I'm not too sure now. I'd say we maybe need to invest in that. Not nuclear, we need to work on what we already have. Could Ireland benefit from going nuclear, do you think?
Is it going to cause long-term damage to the country, to the environment? What's it going to mean that the world of the future looks like for our children growing up? There are less carbon emissions with nuclear, that's one advantage.
Would that suit Ireland with its very green image? Where would the waste go? Would that be in line with Ireland's green image? Where are we going to dispose of all the waste? If there is an accident, what does that look like then? How green will Ireland, indeed the world, look then? I don't know if it's safe or unsafe, but I would be scared. What happened in Chernobyl could happen in Ireland at any time. From what I've seen on social media now...
It seems to me that it's unsafe to have nuclear generators. Well, there might be benefits, but it's the cons with it. They had that situation with cellophane across the... in Cumbria, and it was already then, some years ago, about the RAC being the most radioactive in the world. I'd say there'd be a lot of opposition to it. It seems the Irish are still wary of nuclear power. This country is also home to many of the world's giant technology companies.
They operate more than 90 data storage centres here, which use 21% of island's electricity, and dozens more are planned. The demand for power to run data centres here and in other countries will increase significantly when artificial intelligence is widespread, and that's prompted firms like Amazon, Google and Microsoft to invest in nuclear energy to run their facilities in the United States.
They're especially interested in using the developing technology of smaller modular reactors. Bobby Hollis, the vice president of energy at Microsoft, has been telling me that nuclear will be an addition to using renewable energy. When data centers moved from being at customer locations to being in the cloud, the expectation at that point in time was that it could take 10 times as much energy to meet the cloud requirements. It's actually not even been more than two times as much.
So when we look at AI, we do know that it will be an additional increase in what consumption looks like, but we don't know how much. Why do these tech companies like yours believe that nuclear power is the way forward? As you know, we have a very strong focus on finding a way to decarbonize the energy that we use. And of course, a big part of that is renewable energy, including wind and solar. But that doesn't solve all of our needs when we look at how do you actually supply energy
around the clock and around the year, nuclear has a great opportunity to do that. And so when we look at the different opportunities that are currently up and running and available as viable technologies that can be built today, nuclear definitely fits into that equation for us.
Is the technology for these smaller or small modular reactors the big attraction? The hope is that once those particular technologies are really deployed at scale, that they can start going much faster. Because one of the challenges historically has been the very large units have a lot of opportunities within the scale that they're at, but they require a lot of customization.
So as you have the smaller units available, the hope and the expectation would be that you would be able to manufacture those much quicker and then deploy them at sites much faster than what we've seen historically with the larger sites. The technology for these small modular reactors is really still in its infancy. It can take many years to get this type of nuclear power generation built. So what are you going to do in the meanwhile?
We've got over 34 gigawatts of renewable energy under contract at Microsoft. And so advancing and procuring even more renewable energy is very important. But at the same time, we think nuclear is a very vital addition and supplement and complement, especially as we see the needs of AI that are in the near term. Is the attraction of the smaller modular reactors the future?
The fact that in theory they're going to be built in a factory and then transported to location on site and it doesn't take up as much room. Getting the ability to locate it on a smaller footprint and also to have it manufactured at scale. So you've got many of these that can be deployed at many different sites.
It's not always true that you need a full gigawatt of a nuclear facility. So having that smaller scale that actually can grow with you and serve your needs for a particular location at a particular point in time, it's actually really important and helpful. So the size is a really helpful factor as we look at the change into the SMR technology. Bobby Hollis, the Vice President of Microsoft.
Many countries are investing more in nuclear power, although experts are divided about the advantages of building more reactors as part of efforts to reduce carbon emissions to combat climate change. Reactors are an expensive investment, take many years to build, and storing nuclear waste remains a problem. Renewable sources of power like wind or solar can be cheaper and quicker to build, although the nuclear industry says atomic power stations can be completed just as fast.
In the next episode, I'll examine if nuclear power is the way forward for countries in Africa, where electricity is often in short supply. Most of the African nations have rather small electricity systems. A large reactor simply wouldn't fit into many countries' systems. Every time it broke down, the whole electricity system would collapse. And how close are scientists to developing fusion to provide unlimited power? Within the next decade...
We're going to see some prototypes at least operating fusion reactors. I'm Russell Padmore, and that's this edition of Business Daily.
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