Not Invented Here #3 - Climate Change

'Not Invented Here' syndrome is a term used about institutions which reject practical solutions because they originated from outside the in-group.

This is the third in a series of articles about how pressure groups often oppose a practical solution to a problem if they did not devise it themselves. “Not Invented Here” syndrome is a well known issue that frequently arises from groups that are broadly anti-industry, or in some cases, are simply anti-capitalist.

This edition is written by guest author Zion Lights

Nuclear power is an impressive technology. By producing heat through the process of fission, nuclear reactors boil water and produce pressurised steam, which then spins large turbine blades that drive generators to produce electricity. When permitted to operate for their full life spans, nuclear power plants produce clean energy for 60 years or more. They are one of the most reliable and dependable forms of energy generation, which means that they operate day and night, 24/7, and at high capacity, which means that power plants produce maximum power more than 92% of the time during the year. That’s almost twice as much as natural gas and coal and nearly three times more than wind and solar farms. 

It is impossible to oversell the environmental credentials of nuclear energy. Consider the following. Nuclear power plants have the smallest land footprint per unit of the electricity they produce compared to all of the alternatives, producing 1000 watts per square metre compared with 2 to 3 watts per square metre for wind and 100 watts per square metre for solar. Nuclear power plants are the most land-efficient energy source, requiring 27 times less land per unit of energy than coal and 34 times less than solar PV, which makes them incredibly good for biodiversity. They also require the least amount of resources to build which means less mining and less need for raw materials. They have the lowest lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of any electricity generating source, and thanks to the energy density of uranium fuel, the waste produced by nuclear power plants is extremely small in quantity. It can also be recycled, which makes the technology even better economically and environmentally. 

Wherever nuclear energy programs exist around the world, they produce cheap electricity for consumers - Japanese electricity bills are around 40% cheaper in regions with more nuclear reactors, and countries that derive a lot of electricity from nuclear power plants like Hungary and France also enjoy some of the lowest electricity prices in the EU. 

You would think that climate activists who are worried about carbon emissions and want to phase out fossil fuels would be in favour of building fleets of civilisation-powering, low-carbon nuclear power plants. But you would be wrong. It doesn’t fit their ideology. Achieving real solutions to climate change stands in the way of their real goal, which is degrowth. Hence anti-nuclear activists parading as ‘environmentalists’ have demonised nuclear technology for decades, with well-funded and highly organised groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth leading the charge. They have successfully branded it as environmentally damaging and dangerous, despite masses of evidence to the contrary. 

Thanks to immense efforts from rational voices in recent years, coupled with an energy crisis that caught everyone’s attention across the Western world, nuclear power is experiencing a revival, but for decades it was successfully portrayed as the bogeyman of energy sources. From Germany to Japan, power plants that have operated without any problems for decades have been shut down as a result of overblown fears, and in some countries, like Australia, there is a ban on building nuclear power plants. So convincing has anti-nuclear messaging been that when virtually anyone is asked what they think about nuclear energy they will instantly say that it’s dangerous, bad for the environment, and is hazardous because of nuclear waste. But none of these claims is true. 

In reality, nuclear energy is safer than the ‘renewables’ wind power and hydropower. All of the meltdowns that have ever occurred - including Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island, have resulted in fewer than a few thousand deaths. No one was killed at Three Mile Island and Fukushima; estimates for the deaths caused by Chernobyl vary, but - at most - are still in the few thousands. To put this in context with the alternatives: a similar number of lives have been lost due to wind and solar power, millions of lives are lost every year due to air pollution from fossil fuels, and hydropower is immensely more deadly; approximately 171,000 lives were lost due to the Banqiao Dam Failure in China in 1975. Yet people have not turned against hydropower the way they have against nuclear energy, because it isn’t as much of a threat to the degrowth agenda, since it is geographically restricted to specific regions. Nuclear energy, on the other hand, can be deployed virtually anywhere in the world. 

The waste, or spent fuel, is the most well-managed byproduct of any energy industry. Not only is there an incredibly small amount of it - all the high-level nuclear waste produced in the world would fit in a single football field to a height of approximately 10 yards - but it is stored so efficiently in storage casks that it can withstand having planes flown into it. 

All industries produce waste, as do our lifestyles. If the goal is to maximise efficiency and minimise waste, nuclear comes out on top. Compare nuclear waste with fossil fuel waste that is stored in the Earth’s atmosphere, or the toxic waste left behind from solar panels and wind turbines that leaches into landfill sites, and it’s obvious that many of us have fallen for clever branding when we conflate nuclear energy with dangerous waste. 

If these groups truly cared about people and the planet, they would advocate for nuclear technology. Research by leading climate scientist James Hansen and NASA scientist Pushker Kharecha found that nuclear energy has saved more than two million people from early deaths from air pollution. The clean energy it has generated has saved 64 gigatonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions - around two years’ worth of total global emissions - which would have been produced by the burning of fossil fuels. As the title of their research postulates: nuclear saves lives.  

Many well-meaning environmentalists have been misled with frightening stories about meltdowns and waste, but the people behind this narrative have planted those fears deliberately. They don’t actually want to stop climate change, they want degrowth. For example, Extinction Rebellion, an activist organisation that claimed to be about fighting climate change and of which I was once a member, argued that the ‘current system’ is what led to climate change, therefore the same system can’t save the planet, which means that the solution is to overthrow the system.  

If it’s a difficult concept to grasp, that’s because the branding is so good. Activists and NGOs have been portrayed as heroes across popular media for decades. If Greenpeace, with its million pound turnover, was a corporation, people would feel very differently about their campaigning, which continues to target life-saving technologies like nuclear energy and gene-editing worldwide, including in some of the poorest regions of the world where it is needed by some of the world’s most vulnerable people. 

The core tenet of the degrowth agenda is to reduce consumption, both to consume fewer goods and to use less technology. Intermittent energy fits in with this narrative and is therefore embraced by the wider movement, although there are some more radical degrowthers who are against large-scale energy consumption altogether, including wind and solar power. Anti-nuclear activists worry that abundant reliable energy will lead to continued consumption and therefore continued Capitalism, which is the ‘system’ they want to bring down. They ignore entirely the fact that increased consumption of energy is the reason so many of us have been able to escape poverty, and that human prosperity rises in line with increased access to energy. While millions of people still live in energy poverty, the West is making a tragic mistake of allowing policy to be informed by degrowth ideology. A classic case study is Germany’s decision to close all of its nuclear power plants, putting thousands of workers out of jobs, increasing reliance on burning coal, and leading to some of the most expensive electricity prices in Europe which has led to an exodus of manufacturers which economists are calling deindustrialisation. 

The greatest irony of all is that the same organisations that protest climate change argue that we need to ‘follow the science’ on climate while simultaneously ignoring the evidence for how essential nuclear energy is to this fight. To truly protect the planet, stop climate change, and protect all life on our planet, we need to aim for energy abundance and continued growth, not idolise scarcity and poverty. To do this we need to truly ‘follow the science’ and use more technology, not less, a significant slice of which is clean, reliable, dependable nuclear energy.