Is nuclear power a green solution? Why world tilts toward ‘yes.’

German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, a leading Green Party member who also serves as minister for climate and economic affairs, this week made the sort of announcement that would have been all but unthinkable even a year ago.

Germany, he said, in a subtle shift from longtime promises to rid the country of all nuclear power by December, was no longer going to shutter all three of its remaining nuclear power plants. Instead, given the pressures of climate change and energy shortages, the country would keep two nuclear facilities as emergency energy backups – at least into next year.

Mr. Habeck was adamant that the move did not reflect a new embrace of nuclear technology.

Yet the announcement still seemed to reflect what analysts say is a worldwide trend: Environmental groups and policymakers are softening their stances against nuclear power, some reluctantly, some whole-heartedly, and many with a new sort of humility in the face of today’s climate and energy realities.

“We’re seeing a resurgence of support for nuclear energy, both to address our climate goals, but also to deal with broader energy security goals that have been amplified because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” says Lindsey Walter, director for the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank in Washington. “I think it’s humility, and it’s also kind of a hard-hitting reality.”

That reality has two main components: First, climate change and governments’ need to dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions. Although renewable sources of energy, such as wind and solar, have increased tremendously in the past decade, nuclear power is still the second largest source of carbon-free electricity in the world, behind hydropower. In advanced economies, it is number one.

Second, there is a growing strain on energy systems and electric grids. In Europe, the war in Ukraine has upended natural gas supplies and has resulted in a spike in electricity and other energy costs – a trend expected to get worse during the winter. Elsewhere, heat waves, droughts, and other extreme weather events that have been linked to climate change are putting new pressures on electric grids – another situation expected only to worsen.

“We’re electrifying transportation” and electrifying buildings in the move away from fossil fuels, says Doug Vine, director of energy analysis at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “This is the story of a power structure that needs to grow. We cannot retire nuclear power plants that are providing vast quantities of clean electricity.”

The shifts are global:

• California’s legislature passed a bill last week extending the life of the state’s last operational nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, where reactors had been scheduled to be decommissioned in 2024 and 2025.
• In Japan, which has eschewed nuclear power ever since a 2011 earthquake and tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has promised reinvestment in the energy source.
• The United Kingdom this year presented an energy plan that had nuclear power providing a quarter of its electricity.
• China is planning 150 new reactors in the next 15 years – more than the rest of the world has built in the past 35 years.
• And in Finland, the Green Party voted this year to endorse nuclear energy as a sustainable energy source.

In particular, the latter is a sign not only that governments are seeing a logistical necessity to keep as many power sources online as possible, but that many who once adamantly opposed nuclear power are showing an ability to shift positions.

“We’re seeing it on a grassroots level, but also we’re seeing it at the political level,” says Jonathan Cobb, spokesman for the World Nuclear Association. “That’s quite a thing, to see a Green Party come forward with that policy.”

Among youth, a focus on climate

Underlying this new acceptance, says John Parsons, deputy director for research at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, are younger environmentalists who see climate as their top environmental concern.

“They want to solve the climate problem,” he says. “And they are committed, and interested, and very open-minded about how to do that. They haven’t already made up their mind about this, that, or the other technology in an earlier time when climate was not as urgent an issue.”

And through the lens of climate, he and others say, nuclear power is tempting.

Although critics say it should not be considered a “clean” energy because of its waste byproducts, nuclear fission – the splitting of atoms that creates energy, which in turns heats water and creates steam to run turbines – does not emit carbon dioxide. Unlike wind or solar, nuclear is a consistent energy source, one that is always available.

And research from California and elsewhere shows that when nuclear power goes offline, it is often replaced with fossil-fuel generated power. The Nuclear Energy Institute says that in the United States alone, the use of nuclear power in 2020 prevented more than 471 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions – the equivalent of removing 100 million cars from the road.

This was what convinced Kristin Zaitz to change her views about nuclear power. Now an engineer who works at the Diablo Canyon plant, her background as an environmentalist and outdoorswoman had made her skeptical of nuclear power. It was after scouring data about energy emissions and electricity demands that she shifted her view. In 2016, she co-founded the group Mothers for Nuclear, which advocated to keep Diablo Canyon open.

“We don’t have other great technologies that can do the same things that nuclear can do, which is provide carbon-free electricity whether or not the sun is shining, or the wind is blowing,” she says. “So how could we possibly be saying as a state that we want to electrify everything if we are shutting down clean power? It doesn’t really make any sense.”

At first, she says, people told her that she and Mothers for Nuclear co-founder Heather Hoff were crazy. Others threatened her; environmental groups shunned her. But over the past years, she says, she noticed more people starting to open up to an alternative point of view.

“It’s so hard to change your mind,” she says. “It requires humility. It was hard enough for Heather and me – we used to be suspicious of it. ... But after many years of learning about it, we changed our minds because it aligned with our environmental and humanitarian values.”

Governments’ “yes, and” approach

Those who oppose nuclear energy say it is neither the best nor most effective way to solve the climate crisis. They say it is more cost-effective – and safer – to continue to invest in and ramp up solar and wind energy.

But governments seem to be taking a “yes, and” approach. The new Inflation Reduction Act in the U.S., for instance, offers substantial tax credits for keeping nuclear power plants online, gives incentives for next-generation “advanced nuclear” projects, and also supports solar and wind projects. More than a dozen states in recent years have adjusted legislation to allow for advanced reactor technology, and many have recently reversed bans on the construction of new nuclear power facilities.

“We’re doing a lot of computer modeling that looks at the energy system and uses models to simulate how to make the energy system zero carbon,” says Judi Greenwald, executive director of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance. “And it’s really hard to get there without nuclear energy. ... And so that is seeping into policy circles. It’s also seeping in more broadly to the advocacy community.”

But the embrace of nuclear power does still depend on the political environment at home.

Germany, for instance, has been committed to a nuclear phase-out for the last decade, ever since then-Chancellor Angela Merkel famously did an about-face after Fukushima. Now, the Russian-energy-dependent country is scrambling for alternatives, especially as Russia last week announced it was indefinitely shutting down the Nord Stream 1 pipeline into Germany.

The announced plans this week to keep two of three German plants on standby, therefore, is not necessarily a promise to restart nuclear, or to invest in a future with more nuclear power in it.

Rather, experts say, it’s a reflection of the divided political environment around nuclear energy. The European electricity system is interconnected, so that electricity can flow where it’s most needed.

“If we should face serious shortages in France this winter, and we had previously shut down nuclear in Germany, that would be a bad sign for European solidarity,” says Christoph Maurer, managing director of energy consulting firm Consentec GmbH. “That’s why other countries urged Germany to keep them running.”

But Germany’s political environment prevents as bold a move as reinvesting in nuclear. The roots of Mr. Habeck’s Green Party, after all, are deeply intertwined with an anti-nuclear platform.

The German public would have to be won over, as well.

“Up until last year, the overwhelming majority of the German population was strongly opposed to nuclear power,” says Dr. Maurer. “That’s changed a little in the face of crisis, but Germans remain deeply skeptical.”

Editor's note: One sentence in the story has been updated with a reference to electrifying buildings, to reflect a source's intended meaning. And John Parson's title has also been updated to reflect his most recent role. He is deputy director for research.