How Nuclear Power Might Save The Day

The Telegraph has published an interview with a 32 year-old scientist called Tim Gregory who argues that decarbonisation needs a total rethink in his book Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World. His argument, unsurprisingly, is that nuclear power is the solution to clean and better energy and it’s been staring everyone in the face for decades.

Among the gems are:

“Certainly, for the foreseeable future, nuclear power represents our best shot of sensibly achieving Net Zero and producing all of the electricity that we’re going to need by 2050 when we’re all in electric cars and using heat pumps.”

France showed what was possible – by accident, after the oil crisis of the 1970s:

“They almost decarbonised their entire grid by accident before anyone cared about climate change,” says Gregory, holding up a chip for emphasis. “There’s a real lesson in that. It’s actually possible. The science and technology is there already. We just need to get our act together and deploy it. We’re already at about 30% renewables in a lot of countries. What about 30% renewables, 70% nuclear? Then you’ve done it, and you can all talk about something else and just crack on.”

Germany demonstrates the folly of relying on renewables:

Germany’s Energiewende – its transition away from nuclear and fossil fuels to renewables, which began at the turn of the millennium but accelerated after Fukushima – provides the perfect counterpoint. Nuclear, argues Gregory, provides much better value for money than any of its rivals. For the €500 billion Germany spent on its “failed energy transformation”, Gregory writes, it could have had 40 reactors like the one built in Finland.

“With that much electricity, plus the nuclear it switched off since 2000, Germany could have entirely decarbonised its electricity supply, eliminated the need for unreliable wind turbines and solar panels, electrified all 49 million of its cars, and still have spare electricity to generate 1.7 million tonnes of green hydrogen every year.”

The obstacles are the lack of a will to embark on major long-term infrastructure projects and the disease of despair that has settled in over the West which, as every Daily Sceptic reader knows, has much to do with climate alarmism and its perpetual message of despair:

“In the UK, we used to be world leaders at building nuclear power stations, not just quickly but en masse. The median build time in Europe back in the 1970s and 1980s was about six years, which is about what it is today in China and South Korea,” he says, pointing to the stacks where British scientists took the first steps into the Atomic Age.

“There is a doom and gloom in society, and people are demoralised,” says Gregory. “I don’t want to diminish the very real problems that a lot of people face and the big challenges that the UK faces and the world faces, but we are actually capable of doing some really cool stuff when we put our minds to it.” That’s where his Apollo programme analogy comes in. “A massive, concerted effort on the nuclear power front would solve a lot of our problems. And it’s totally achievable.”

Gregory despairs at the whole mentality of eco activism:

“I’ve read a lot of Greenpeace literature, a lot of Friends of the Earth literature – I haven’t just put myself into an echo chamber. But I came away from the conversation with this guy really disappointed by how weak the arguments were. They’re either based on things that aren’t true, or gut feelings, and energy policy is not something that should be dictated by gut feeling.”

Gregory’s argument is that green technology should be a) cleaner and b) better – the latter concept being something that often seems to escape eco activism, such as the LED bulb:

“That’s exactly the kind of technology that we should be implementing more of. It’s better than what it replaces in its function, and it’s cheaper and it’s better for the environment. It’s perfect. Who can argue with that?”

He is similarly irked by ‘greenwashing’ and uses a brief section of Going Nuclear to interrogate Greta Thunberg’s fabled transatlantic yacht voyage to the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019. While she may not have racked up any air miles getting there, the same cannot be said for a crew of five who had to fly to New York to retrieve the vessel and sail it back to Sweden. “Of all the things in my book that might get me cancelled, the opening to that chapter might be one,” Gregory says.

None of this gets round the facts that EVs are expensive, don’t last, wear out roads more quickly and don’t go far enough on a charge, or that heat pumps use vast amounts of electricity and don’t work very well – or, of course, that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but boosts plant growth and is of net benefit to the planet. But perhaps for those who still believe in the imperative of reducing carbon emissions, scientists like Gregory will lead them down a more sensible and less damaging road – at least until they can be persuaded to abandon the false climate alarmist narrative altogether.

Worth reading in full.