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The New Nuclear Fever, Debunked

Politicians who push small reactors raise false hopes that splitting atoms can make a real dent in the climate crisis.

Tyee contributing editor Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning journalist whose books and articles focus on epidemics, the energy industry, nature and more.

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Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announcing the launch of a public engagement effort to explore nuclear energy on Aug. 25. Photo by Chris Schwarz via Alberta government.

Premier Danielle Smith proposes that nuclear power could be “Alberta’s next energy frontier.” To that end, she recently created a “nuclear engagement survey panel” to figure out how to propel economic growth in her province.

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According to Smith, nuclear generators will not only help power scores of artificial-intelligence data centres in rural Alberta but also help to double oil production from the oilsands.

The promise of nuclear power “means affordable power, reliable supply and low emissions that strengthen our grid while fuelling growth,” said the premier. “It means new jobs and opportunities for Alberta workers and communities.”

The province is specifically betting on small modular reactors, or SMRs, because they, as a United Conservative Party release put it, “have the potential to supply heat and power to the oilsands, simultaneously reducing emissions and supporting Alberta’s energy future.”

Smith’s government has already given the oilsands giant Cenovus Energy $7 million to study the matter.

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Smith isn’t the only premier with nuclear ambitions. New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and Ontario all think the future lies in splitting atoms. Prime Minister Mark Carney has thrown the weight of the federal government behind Ontario’s Darlington New Nuclear Project. So far the feds have invested nearly $1 billion to advance this experimental small modular reactor.

The industry has new powerful promoters. Tech billionaires are now thirsting for more electricity to feed their data centres and machine intelligence. Everyone from Jeff Bezos to Bill Gates is investing in nuclear reactors.

Unfortunately, these claims that nuclear power can provide cheap energy security or reverse the persistent failure of national and global policies to reduce CO2 emissions is an illusion.

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Even the 2024 World Nuclear Status Industry Report offers a reality check. It reports that apart from new reactors built in China (almost all over budget), “the promise of nuclear” has “never materialized.” It adds that there is no global nuclear renaissance and likely won’t be one. Furthermore, the report pours cold water on the ability of SMRs, a nascent technology, to play any significant role in reducing carbon emissions.

That is not to say that nuclear technology won’t play a minor role in our highly problematic energy future. But what nuclear power can’t do is as luminous as a radium dial. Due to its cost and complexity, it will not provide cheap or low-emission electricity in timeframe or scale that matters as climate change continues to broil an indifferent civilization.

“Given the time required to implement small modular reactors,” notes energy analyst David Hughes, “Smith will likely be long gone before SMRs are ever implemented in Alberta to provide power for her dreams of doubling oil production.”

Vaclav Smil, one of the world’s foremost energy ecologists, no doubt concurs. Whenever anyone asks him about the future of SMRs he says, “Give me a call or send me an email once you see such wonders built on schedule, on budget, and in aggregate capacities large enough to make a real difference.” He is not expecting any calls for at least a decade or two.

The first heyday of hype

The nuclear fixations of Smith and Carney are a telling symptom of our Titanic-like predicament. Every energy solution trotted out to solve a growing matrix of issues such as climate change or, in Alberta’s case, doubling oil production just becomes a source of more problems. Or an opportunity for corporate raiders to deplete the public purse.

Smith and other politicians might consider the brief history of nuclear energy and its rousing propaganda.

Nuclear power, after overpromising and underdelivering during its heyday of the second half of the 20th century, remains what Smil calls a “successful failure.”

Its high priests (now they are nuclear bros) promised “electrical energy too cheap to meter” and “nuplexes” that would power satellites, TV stations and desalinization plants. Atomic energy also promised to replace oil.

But complexity and brutal economics buried the techno-hype in piles of radioactive waste. Almost every large reactor ever built has been plagued by delays, technical difficulties, corruption and enormous cost overruns. A recent study that looked at 180 nuclear projects found that only five met their original cost and time goals. These economic realities explain why you don’t find a lot of nuclear reactors in Canada.

By the 1980s, such realities brought the so-called nuclear revolution to a crawl. Since then, more reactors have been retired than brought online. Global production of nuclear power probably peaked sometime around 2006. Today nuclear power accounts for about two per cent of delivered global energy consumption and that’s not likely to change much through 2050.

U.S. energy analyst Art Berman calculates that it would take the construction of 33 new plants per year for the next 27 years to move nuclear from two to four per cent of total energy supply. Smil has done his own math. To provide 10 per cent of its electrical supply, the U.S. would have to build and regulate some 1300 SMRs capable of putting out 100 megawatts per unit, he says.

And who has got the money, scientists and resources to do that in a period of growing political turmoil and economic corruption?

The new pitch

None of these realities have stopped industry lobbyists from designing a new sales pitch. If large, expensive and accident-prone reactors can’t do the trick, then surely small modular reactors are the agreeable solution. There is a need, they told Canadian politicians, “for smaller, simpler and cheaper nuclear energy in a world that will need to aggressively pursue low-carbon and clean energy technologies.”

The suggestion was that these handy reactors could be churned out by the hundreds from robot-filled factories, like electric cars. And then easily planted at communities’ doorsteps.

But the evidence shows that SMRs are not small (they occupy the area of a city block), cheap or, for that matter, any safer than large reactors.

As for those larger ones, consider the Plant Vogtle Generator in the state of Georgia. Billed as part of the nuclear renaissance, Georgia Power started new construction at this nuclear site in 2009. Where there were two aging reactors the idea was to add two new ones. The initial budget was $14 billion and the reactors were scheduled to go on stream in 2017. Instead, the project will have taken 17 years to finish at a cost of $36 billion, “making it the most expensive power plant ever built on Earth.” Georgians will soon be paying the highest electrical bills in the United States.

The cost overruns had nothing to do with regulation (a constant complaint of nuclear lobbyists) and everything to do with mismanagement and corruption. As one study noted, “inadequate Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulation and streamlining procedures meant to encourage investment in new nuclear projects contributed to excessive costs.” In nearby South Carolina a similar two-reactor project resulted in federal and state criminal investigations due to officials lying about cost of construction. Four executives even went to jail. That state wisely abandoned its nuclear white elephant.

Alberta Revives Its Nuclear Energy Dreams

So here’s a good question recently posed by M.V. Ramana, a professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of British Columbia and author of Nuclear Is Not the Solution. “If nuclear power is so expensive and it takes so long to build a reactor, why do corporations get involved in this enterprise at all?”

The answer isn’t complicated. If the public can be convinced “to bear a large fraction of the high costs of building nuclear plants and operating them, either in the form of higher power bills or in the form of taxes… then many companies find nuclear power attractive.” In other words, if the public pays — and that’s what Smith and Carney are proposing — then a corporation can benefit.

A steep path for SMRs

Members of the public, therefore, should be aware of the risks they are being asked to take on by funding the “advanced” technology of SMRs which remains largely untested. And they should know that to achieve an economy of scale would require the production of thousands of SMRs, which is not happening anywhere any time soon.

According to JP Morgan’s annual energy 2025 report, there are only three operating SMRs in the world: two in Russia and one in China and another under construction in Argentina. None came in on budget. “The cost overruns on the China SMR was 300 per cent, on Russian SMRs 400 per cent and on the Argentina SMR (so far) 700 per cent.” All promised to be up and running in three to four years and all took 12 years or more to complete. Argentina’s SMR project began in 2014 and it’s still not finished. That may happen in 2027.

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Given these construction time frames, SMR certainly won’t put a dent in climate change in the near future or even decades from now. Certainly not in Russia, which uses its SMRs to mine arctic resources and produce more oil.

And then there is the inconvenient issue of nuclear waste. You’d think something called a small reactor would pump out small volumes of waste. That’s not what researchers discovered in 2022. They concluded, “SMRs will produce more voluminous and chemically/physically reactive waste than Light Water Reactors.” Managing and disposing this waste will be problematic. In fact, they calculated, “water-, molten salt–, and sodium-cooled SMR designs will increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal by factors of two to 30.”

There is another problem with Canada’s enthusiasm for SMRs. And that has to do with regulation. UBC’s Ramana raises two pertinent worries.

The first concerns “evidence of conflicts of interest and institutional bias within Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.” That’s the regulatory body that is supposed to evaluate these complex technologies.

The second is the exclusion of small modular reactors from the Impact Assessment process. That’s right, SMRs don’t have to go through a process that would test any proponent’s claims about risks or harm to the environment. “Given the well-known hazards associated with nuclear power, these legislative gaps are particularly egregious as they expose citizens and communities to significant risks without an accompanying rigorous and participatory assessment process,” notes Ramana.

So Canadian politicians in Alberta and Ottawa are now promoting a largely untested nuclear technology as a solution to growing fossil fuel demand, rising electrical bills and the existential threat that CO2 emissions pose. In the process, they are conning citizens unless they share the facts about the true costs in dollars and to the environment. Those who don’t are promoters for an industry that exists on corporate welfare: your tax dollars.

Neither ‘Biofuel’ Nor Nuclear Will Solve Our Energy Problems

Citizens should also know that despite being encouraged to place our hopes in a fast-approaching new era of renewable energy, fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions grew again in 2024. Building a renewables-based system that is 100 per cent firm and reliable won’t be cheap. One key reason is that relying on solar and wind power through long periods of cloudy or wind drought weather requires massive overbuilding and an extensive storage system.

In fact, there is no one technological solution that will enable humanity to continue with what Smil describes as our “stupid, insane and irresponsible” spending of energy. Smil uses those words because the global economy is now using renewable energy not to retire fossil fuels but to add to energy consumption, thereby amplifying the crisis.

An honest and imperfect response to the climate crisis would require a political, behavioural, economic and moral transition that would systematically reduce our energy and material consumption at an unprecedented pace. But that’s not an action any modern politician seems to be able to contemplate, let alone discuss.

Hence the nuclear delusions promoted in Alberta, Ottawa and pretty much everywhere timid leaders opt to sooth citizens with energy fairy tales.

Andrew Nikiforuk has been writing about epidemics, globalization and the oil and gas industry for nearly 20 years and cares deeply about accuracy, government accountability and cumulative impacts. He has won seven National Magazine Awards for his journalism since 1989 and top honours for investigative writing from the Association of Canadian Journalists.

Andrew has also published several books, including two about pandemics: The Fourth Horseman (1996) and Pandemonium (2007). The dramatic, Alberta-based Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War Against Big Oil, won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction in 2002. Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent, which considers the world’s largest energy project, was a national bestseller and won the 2009 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award and was listed as a finalist for the Grantham Prize for Excellence In Reporting on the Environment. Empire of the Beetle, a startling look at pine beetles and the world’s most powerful landscape changer, was nominated for the Governor General’s award for Non-Fiction in 2011. And Slick Water: Fracking and One Insider’s Stand Against the World’s Most Powerful Industry, won the 2016 Science in Society Journalism Award.