If you've been reading my work for more than a day or two, you'll know that I'm a big proponent of nuclear power for electricity generation. I'm a big proponent of nuclear power for driving our fleet of super-sized aircraft carriers, as well, but that's a topic for another time. I'm fond of saying that we solve today's problems with tomorrow's technology, and there's just no escaping the fact that nuclear fission reactors are part of our energy future. New reactor designs, including molten-salt reactors and small modular reactors (SMRs) are making nuclear power easier to install, more efficient, and safer, almost with each passing day. Nuclear power is everything the climate scolds claim to want: Clean, reliable, safe.
Fusion power may one day be part of the picture, too, but a practical grid-scale fusion reactor is probably still 40 years away, just as it has been for 80 years.
Now, in Europe, the various nations have been moving away from nuclear power, led by Germany, which has shuttered most of its former nuclear generation capacity. Now, no less than the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is calling it a mistake. And that's remarkable.
In 2011, when Angela Merkel decided that Germany had to phase out nuclear power because things like earthquakes and tsunamis happen in Japan, Ursula von der Leyen was Labour Minister and also vice-chair of the CDU. In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, von der Leyen defended Merkel’s decision, insisting that her government had “to respond to the new developments”: the Fukushima disaster, she said, had shown everyone “that the unthinkable has now become possible – a worst-case accident in a high-technology country”.
Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany and was once a member of that communist country's Free German Youth (FDJ), East Germany's communist youth movement that was directly controlled by the Marxist–Leninist Socialist Unity Party of Germany. Merkel was reportedly not an enthusiastic communist, but her term as Chancellor in the reunited Germany did reveal one thing about her: She wasn't one to let facts stand in the way of a leftist policy agenda, or a ridiculous energy policy, like shutting down all of their nuclear power plants.
Now, though, Europe may be coming around, and the President of the European Commission may be leading the way.
Germany has spent the years since 2011 systematically shutting down its own nuclear reactors and also lobbying other European nations to do the same. Thanks to this very dumb policy which von der Leyen openly supported, our power has got a lot more expensive and our industry a lot less competitive.
Today, von der Leyen is President of the European Commission, and she has decided that maybe the phase-out wasn’t such a great idea after all. Far from abandoning nuclear energy, she now wants the EU to be become a world-leading “pioneer in nuclear technology”:
While in 1990 one-third of Europe’s energy came from nuclear, today it’s only close to 15%. This reduction in the share of nuclear was a choice. And in hindsight, it was as strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back on a reliable, affordable source of low-emission power. This should change. … Nuclear energy is reliable, providing electricity all year around the clock. … Europe has been a pioneer in nuclear technology and could once against lead the world in it.
In other words, in abandoning nuclear power, Germany has committed the dumbest mistake since Operation Barbarossa.
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Part of the reasons for shuttering Germany's nuclear policy was the perceived danger of reactor accidents, like Three Mile Island and Japan's Fukushima disaster. But there are a few relevant facts; measuring as generously as possible, the deaths and long-term illnesses caused by those accidents were in single digits. And as for the Fukushima event, well, Germany isn't a place where tsunamis are likely to be a problem.
The fact is, for a continent as small and as densely populated as Europe, nuclear power could solve a lot of problems. It makes sense from a logistic standpoint; nuclear power, especially from modern reactor designs, is safe, reliable, clean, and many new designs, like the aforementioned small modular reactors, could provide clean, reliable electricity in some of Europe's few remaining remote places. It makes sense as well from a security standpoint, as with (again) things like small modular reactors, Europe could begin the first steps towards something we should be doing here: Decentralizing our electrical grid.
Of course, none of this will appease Europe's increasingly vocal climate scolds. They will continue to yap about nuclear power, about oil, about gas, all the while speaking freely on topics they know next to nothing about, while proposing to power a modern society on rainbows, pixie dust, and unicorn flatulence. That's fine. Let them yap. Start building reactors. Not just in Europe - here, too. Let's start undoing this mistake.
