Down the looking glass: debunking renewable myths and examining nuclear’s real risks and ailing economics.

24 min readSep 1, 2021

Nothing is more motivating to me than proving a friend wrong.

Let’s rewind a bit. Last week during one of our zoom games nights, a friend of mine commented that current nuclear power plants were our best chance to decarbonise, and better than “unreliable renewable” energy.

I was caught off guard.

For as long as I can remember I have been against any power source that releases emissions or harms our environment. However, as I faced barrage of anti-renewable arguments and pro-nuclear stats, I realised I was not coming up against an argument, I was coming up against an ideology. A deep mistrust of renewables, black and white arguments on nuclear energy density, and misinformation about renewables, combined with a veiled understanding of nuclear waste and the economics of nuclear.

I needed to refresh my view. More so I needed a stronger stance, especially as Australia is one of the largest exporters of uranium in the world (and to my amazement later, still dumps radioactive waste in our backyard)

So, I wrote a medium article and went down the deepest rabbit hole possible. Nuclear Power.

1. So why are so many people against renewables? And what makes them turn to nuclear energy?

This was the first question I set out to answer, and the main catalyst for me to go down this dark, dark rabbit hole.

From what I can tell, most people’s opinion seems to be formed when they start thinking about the future energy needs of the world. Be it considering how to decarbonise our energy industry which makes up for 35% global emissions, or be it considering stable energy sources that can support our growing needs for energy.

Somewhere along this thought process, people seem to be divided into three camps, those that wholeheartedly believe in renewables, those who don’t believe renewables can meet our energy needs, and those that sit somewhere in between, and turn to the likes of nuclear power as a means to decarbonise and meet energy needs.

These are all reasonable conclusions and usually forms the basis to people’s point of view towards the energy industry, including those of my friends. However opinions can morph, they can become divorced of facts, an ideology of sorts, which risks misinformation filtering into debates, mainstream media, or even political decisions.

This does seem to be how the internet works.

For a world where our yearly emissions place us on a knife’s edge of a worsening climate disaster, it has never been more important to understand fact from fiction. Countries need to understand how their energy choices have large ramifications.

Energy availability and cost is linked to individual wealth and health. Energy availability also drives how quickly our economy grows and literally powers any new technology. For countries that tend to have less access to energy, that tends to go hand in hand with a reduced wealth per capita. For this reason, the economics of energy are extremely important when it comes to decarbonising.

For me personally, this just reinforces how circular our world is, and how health, wealth, education, energy, climate change and economics are all tied together. This is why I am a strong supporter of renewables, and in particular of renewables which don’t damage our environment or leave behind waste for future generations.

But what is the best energy source? To compare different energy sources, the best way is to add up all the emissions that occur during construction, manufacturing or maintenance and most importantly direct emissions. For renewables this is usually the indirect emission used to create solar panels, or manufacture fibre glass wind turbines. For nuclear this is usually the construction and materials needed for power plants. For coal and gas, it’s mostly from direct emissions released back into the atmosphere.

Emissions of energy production (gCO₂kWH)

A quick recap on direct and indirect emissions. Direct emissions from energy sources is how much greenhouse gas is released into the atmosphere. This is usually an inherent weakness on the type of electricity source, and the only successful way to control this is through carbon capture. Simplistically speaking this is always a losing battle trying to capture carbon while constantly outputting more. Carbon capture does have a role to play though and I will cover this in a future article.

Indirect emissions, are tied to infrastructure and supply chain, and make up the majority of emissions for renewables and nuclear power. The unique thing about indirect emissions is that these can quickly be reduced by developing new technology that doesn’t require certain materials or modernising manufacturing processes, helped by certain parts of a supply chain switching over to green energy.

Now back to the argument that renewables aren’t carbon neutral. While this is true, they are a hell of a lot better than the alternative and direct emissions from coal. And while we’re not totally emission free with renewables, no new technology ever is, and with more investment, government regulation and innovation, there’s no doubt the technology will continue to improve, and our emissions footprint will go down. Additionally, as technology advances the price of energy from renewables goes down which will be another incentive to decarbonise our economy.

The next argument that I hear a lot is that renewables are unable to meet the energy demands of the world, and notorious unreliable suppliers of energy.

Yes, one solar panel or wind turbine will generate less than one coal powerplant and likewise less than one nuclear power plant. But this is a simplistic take. Switching to renewables isn’t just about power it’s also about changing our infrastructure from centralised distribution to decentralised and democratised. More decentralised power sources closer to your home mean less transmission losses over powerlines and less vulnerability relying on just one power station.

The infrastructure to our grid will also need to keep evolving. Batteries and storage will play a role when it comes to load balancing. Smart grids and energy routing through the likes of internet of things that monitor electrical transmission will be key. Grid inertia and capacitors and fly wheels will also play a role.

The other example I hear a lot is the energy volatility of renewables. Germany is thrown around a lot in this example, arguments like the huge spending to get renewables off the ground and the costly price of electricity. This superficial take misses the point completely. Since the 1990, Germany has managed to reduce their emissions by 30%. The fact that Germany now powers, it’s country on nearly 50% renewable energy is a testament to renewable energy. While this hasn’t been a smooth ride, I don’t think anyone can name a technology revolution that doesn’t have bumps, especially considering how Germany is shutting down coal power stations at lightning speeds. There’s a great article here that I highly recommend https://www.zdnet.com/article/myth-busting-germanys-energy-transition/

You’re welcome Germany, keep up the great job

The next argument that I hear a lot is around the energy density of nuclear power. I can not argue against this. There’s nothing currently in the world that can compare with the energy density of nuclear fission. Maybe fusion one day, where no long-lived nuclear waste is produced. This is still theoretical.

To give some accurate numbers on just how energy dense nuclear materials is, let’s consider two 1000 megawatt power stations both outputting the same amount of energy. It would take 300,000 tonnes of coal to generate this power, while nuclear on the other hand only need 30 tonnes of fuel. But again, that’s setting the bar low, as it’s not hard to beat coal power.

So how about comparing the energy density between wind turbines and a nuclear facility. Putting aside the advantages of how wind can be decentralised, and the zero risk of nuclear waste, contamination, cancer and death. Yes, the energy density of nuclear is well over a thousand times better than wind, but so are the costs and ramp up time to build them. Conservatively nuclear facilities take up to 10 years to build and cost somewhere between $2 billion to $20 billion dollars. Whereas a wind turbine costs only 6 million dollars and can be deployed in less than 6 months. This means I could build roughly 2000 wind turbines for about 12 billion dollars, less than many nuclear power plants. In actual fact you only need about 300 wind turbines (3.5 mega watts each) or 50,000 homes with a solar panels (4 kilo watt system around about 6x5meters of roof space) to meet the energy produced from a nuclear power plant (1000 mega watts). More importantly I could deploy these in a shorter amount of time to immediately start generating energy and reducing emissions.

The speed to deploy is extremely important. Take one country that builds a steady amount of wind turbines over 10 years until the wind power reaches the combined output of one nuclear facility. Their neighbouring country decides instead to build one nuclear power plant that takes 10 year to build. Both countries will have the same yearly power output at the 10 years mark. The difference though is that the first country’s wind turbines have been steadily generating power and ramping up from as early as the 6 month mark, so over a ten year period they already have a huge lead in generating energy, before the nuclear powerplant is even turned on. So, while the second nuclear country claims they generate energy more efficiently, the reality is they’ve generated significantly less than their neighbour over that time period. This thought experiment is extremely important when it comes to deciding what energy sources we need to build in the short term to decarbonise

The last argument I hear is why choose renewables, nuclear is the future. To be fair over the last few years nuclear has found its way back into the news again, with great potential of a next generation technology referred to as generation IV. This technology actually has some promise, however is still in its infancy and yet to be deployed commercially at grand scale

The fact is the nuclear industry peaked back in 1993, generating around 18% of the world’s energy. Even today with 443 reactors spread across 30 countries and another 50 reactors getting built, with China and India investing heavily, nuclear energy has slipped to only 10% worldwide. On top of this, the majority of the nuclear fleet worldwide are coming to the end of their life span with the average age of nuclear plants world-wide clocking in at 30 years.

So in this section we have debunked a lot of myths around renewables and misinformation from nuclear lobbyists, but one question I still have, is nuclear energy renewable?

2. Is current nuclear power renewable?

At face value nuclear power doesn’t have a large emissions footprint at all. It’s carbon footprint beats a lot of alternative renewables. This number may be somewhat misleading as scope 3 emissions from mining and shipping uranium are not included in their footprint. However as nearly all renewables also require some sort of type of precious material that usually requires mining and shipping, I’ll put this aside for now and just focus on the uranium and direct emissions released.

So does uranium release any carbon emissions directly. No, it does not.

So is current nuclear power renewable? The answer is also no.

With our current nuclear reactors, and a global projected consumption, we have an expiry date of roughly 200 years before uranium runs out, maybe a bit more if we get better at using other sources like Thorium, which is more readily available than our remaining Uranium reserves of 13 million tonnes.

Okay, so it’s clear we’re running nuclear powerplants with a finite resource, uranium. Finite resources tend to be just that. Finite. And eventually they will run out. So by definition, this means nuclear power plants cannot be considered as renewable energy.

…. Well sort of. This answer gets more complex when considering some new technology like Breeder reactors and our ability to potentially process uranium more efficiently, even reuse in some cases. There is also widely available reprocessing technology as well. More on this later.

The last part of the mystery to unravel, is how sustainable nuclear power is considering radioactive waste will be around for thousands of years. These are all very real risks.

3. Nuclear waste, what is it, where does it go.

To understand nuclear waste of current generation III power plants, and how worried I should be. I had to go back to school and understand what the hell happens inside a nuclear reactor.

Reactors are there to basically do something that is called fission. Fission is essentially splitting atoms to generate energy. Fusion is when you join an atom to release energy. The tendency of an atom to split or join is directly tied to it’s atomic structure. For elements with a small atomic mass like Hydrogen, they have less protons and therefore less repulsion to each other, and work as a better candidate for fusion. For elements like uranium with a large atomic mass they are best suited to fission as they’re too heavy to fuse. Now this is important as all the best fissile materials are radioactive, and as we only have commercially available technology for fission and not fusion, it means all the waste we generate is radioactive.

This fissile material is usually Uranium or Thorium. Both are naturally radioactive and in constant state of decay, and when encouraged, able to split their own atoms to release energy. Uranium comes in many forms (isotopes, same element with different amount of neutrons), and for current reactors the most useful isotope is U-235. Remember this for later.

The nuclear power process is kicked off when beryllium is placed near uranium in a reactor and the beryllium starts to decay and in turn release a neutron. This neutron then hits the neighbouring U-235 that also becomes unstable, splits, emits another neutron, ultimately causing a chain reaction within the reactor core. The strength of this chain reaction is directly linked to the energy output of the reactor, and can be controlled through gasses to slow neutrons and additional rods of other materials such as boron and cadium that are particularly good at absorbing neutrons. Basically, these gasses and rods are inserted and removed to absorb a desired number of neutrons to keep the chain reaction at favourable level. This chain reaction is managed to be at specific levels, so that it can continuously release uniform heat that drives steam turbines. Rotating steam turbines means kinetic energy that can be used to make magnets rotate around a coil, which thanks to the discovery from our friend Faraday, induces an electrical current. Simple.

Standard reactors will keep driving these steam turbines as long as the fission process continues. Now this important. A standard fission process will continue as long as the Uranium emitting neutrons remains as a certain isotope U-235. Due to the unstable nature of U-235, once a certain amount of energy is emitted from splitting Uranium atoms, eventually the isotope will change and result in the waste product U-238, an isotope that can’t undergo fission, can’t produce energy and one that needs be swapped out with fresh U-235.

We now have our waste. Spent fuel rods of U-238 eventually go on to decay to Plutonium, and a whole bunch of nasty radioactive isotopes that are a result of splitting U-235. Additionally, we have all the wear and tear on the reactor over the years which also eventually becomes waste. From there depending on the country all this either becomes direct waste or is partially recycled or reprocessed.

Let’s consider what happens with waste first. Waste is categorised by half-life and its danger, and this fits into four main categories, spent fuel rods, high, intermediate and low-level waste. Each type of waste has a different storage technique based on the risk, and each storage technique comes with its own risk.

In terms of spent fuel and high-level waste worldwide. Since the dawn of the nuclear age in the 40's, we’ve already created 370,793 tonnes of waste when it comes to spent fuel rods. Not much in the grand scheme of things considering Australia generates roughly 75million tonnes of rubbish a year. But this is not typical waste, high level waste is highly radioactive and has a half-life in most cases is beyond 1000 years. This waste is either in long term storage or deeply buried. Globally this type of radioactive waste grows by 12,000 tonnes each year, basically a new football field of waste a meter high, every year.

However, this waste is just the tip of the iceberg and only makes up 1% of the total radioactive waste, even less when you consider the mining radioactive runoff.

The other 99% is called, low and intermediate level waste. The language of naming this waste as low level and intermediate is also a bit misleading. Globally volumes for this to date are estimated to be almost 4 million m3. This waste is far from safe and requires storage and shielding, with 6% of it requiring long term storage as well up to 700 years. All of this by the way, is allowed to be stored close to the surface where many natural water tables occur.

Now this all sounds very alarmist (It sort of is to be honest). But let’s quickly cover some of the technology that we have to make storage safer. Well slightly safer. For a lot of waste, this is usually stored in corrosive resistant material such as stainless steel, polyethylene or glass lined tanks.

However, this is far from a perfect system, external environmental factors can interact with these storage devices, such as water getting inside the steel canisters, or between the canister and the glass or ceramic. This can trigger a string of corrosive reactions that degrades both materials, and puts a high risk around storing radioactive materials.

With some material having a half-life well over a thousand years, it’s not just a question of storage, it’s also a question of maintenance of all these tanks. No engineer will ever tell you a material can last 1000 years without some sort of degradation. This ongoing maintenance and cost must be considered when considering nuclear waste, not to mention the possibility of risks and subsequent cost to public health.

We don’t have to look far when it comes to leaks. We’ve already seen leaks from the legacy tanks from the Manhattan project, and leaks from Marshall islands, as well leaks from dumped Russian uranium in the artic. In Hanford, in just the last 50 years, from the 149 steel tanks created, 69 have leaked.

Let’s rewind though, nuclear waste can be recycled right? Correct in many places like Europe, Russia and Japan reprocessing nuclear waste is a common practice. This does come with a price though, with each type of radioactive waste or isotope requiring a specific process. This contributes to overall cost of nuclear power, which is one of the highest world-wide by energy type which I will cover later in the economics of nuclear power. Additionally contrary to popular belief this isn’t pure recycling, it simply separates uranium that can be reused again with fission products which still need to be disposed of.

Lastly Uranium doesn’t just magically appear, it needs to be mined from ore. The uranium content of the ore is usually between 0.1% and 0.2%. This means the ore needs processing to extract this miniscule amount of Uranium, and from this process leaves behind the other 99.9% ore, typically a type of slurry. This 99.9% is called the tailings and is almost as radioactive as the mined ore. Now consider this for every 1kg of Uranium we export, we create 999kg of radioactive waste. Globally this is estimated to be an additional 2.3 billion tonnes. To put that in perspective it’s the same weight as if I was to build a city of 10,000 radioactive skyscrapers. This is increasing rapidly at 60,000 tonnes a year. I’m surprised this isn’t more widely reported. I really had to dig to find this one out.

Finally, there are also two other waste products we must consider, tritium and thermal waste from nuclear plants. More on this in health risks.

4. Potential health and human effects from current nuclear power plants.

Hot tip, walk away from radioactive waste

Now this really blows my mind.

Did you know each nuclear power plants can chew through almost 18 billion litres of water a year, for my Australian friends this is approximately the volume of water in Melbourne’s Port Phillip bay which is 25km3.

In America, nuclear already uses 41% of America’s water every year. For this reason, most nuclear power plants are placed near the oceans for easy access to water, and some recycle water. Those that are not close to oceans, put a severe strain on our water reserves, something that continues to get exasperated around the globe with climate change.

For power plants that are close to oceans, this also increases the risk profile of climate related disasters, due to plants being close to sea level. Look at what happened to Fukushima, a health mess that Japan is still cleaning up 10 years later.

So why do nuclear power plants use so much water, is it radio active and where does it go?

In short, water is used to either convey heat from the reactor core to the steam turbines or used to remove surplus heat from the reactor. One type needs to be treated, and the other type is returned typically to the oceans.

Nuclear plants get hot. Very hot. So there’s a need to get rid of a lot of thermal water typically around 30 to 40 degrees. Thermal water as it’s not radioactive is usually returned to the nearest water body, typically oceans. There is a link to nuclear power plants returning large amounts of warm water back that is shown to cause lack of oxygenation in oceans, coral bleaching and more. This obviously effects all ecosystems that are tied to oceans, including humans who are heavily reliant on the fishing industry. This not something that we can write off.

For the water that needs to be treated. The radioactive water starts off with typically 69 radioactive isotopes in it, most of them are treatable and most of the gamma and beta ions are removed. There is however one radioactive isotope that remains in the water and is returned to our oceans. Tritium.

Emerging evidence points to Tritium potentially affecting the DNA of our food sources due to it’s ionisation. There is also evidence that Tritium increase the chance of cancers.

According to the EPA, acceptable Tritium levels in water released back to the oceans from nuclear power plants are

“not a health based standard, it was a based on what was easily achievable”.

For this reason the EPA is revisiting the standards on Tritium due to emerging health concerns. One example of concern around Tritium is tied to Fukushima disaster, where Japan has been blocked by its neighbours returning tritium water back into the oceans.

Now putting water sources aside. There is also the disposal of uranium tailings, ie the other 99% of waste created from mining uranium. Storage of Uranium tailings as far as I can tell is a no win scenario. When it’s stored above ground the tailings can dry out and radioactive sand can be carried great distances, alternatively if it’s stored underground it risks seeping into water tables and entering the food chain. Did I mention that Australia currently stores tailings on three sites?

When considering just one mine in isolation, Ranger — an Australian mine located in northern territory, it has had almost 200 environmental incidents recorded Environment Australia since 1979, including the discharge of a million litres of radioactive slurry in 2013. If the world was to switch to nuclear power, these incidents would mathematically increase based on a demand.

Rounding out my analysis on the risks to human health, I wanted to look at what it could be like to live in a world with even more nuclear reactors and what that would mean for the big C word. Cancer.

No Simpson memes in this part of the article.

Before we get into this, a quick recap on cancer is important. Did you know that only 5–10% of all cancer cases can be attributed to genetic defects, whereas the remaining 90–95% of cancers are caused by environment factors and lifestyle. This distribution of cancers blew my mind, and reinforced that we can in fact control our health and destiny by reducing cancerous environments and behaviour.

There is no shortage on the number of studies showing a risk of cancers when living close to nuclear power plants or reprocessing facilities. For families living with 5km, this will give children less than five years old a 61% increase of incidence of all cancers. Living further away at 16km, children up to age 9 have an increased 23% higher incidence of getting leukaemia. These risks are ongoing with or without any nuclear meltdowns. In the US, there are 4 million people living within 16km of a nuclear power plant. Even if these percentage were off by 5–10% the invisible cost on health over time can not be discounted.

Nuclear power in the US. One third of Americans live within 50 miles

There have been around 100 direct accidents relating to nuclear power plants over the last half century. Three major civilian meltdowns including Fukushima, Chernobyl and Long Island, and another nineteen other core meltdowns. The number of deaths and cancer is difficult to estimate as it can take years to develop. For example although Chernobyl has only been attributed to 4000 deaths, however death estimates range up to the millions when it comes to linked premature deaths from the expulsion of radioactive particles that were detected all the way across Europe. Nearly 600,000 Russian worker were exposed to radioactive material during the clean-up.

Additionally, from my research I have found about 10 major leaks of uranium tail trimmings that have released over 6 million cubic meters of radioactive material back into subsoil or water tables. The flow on effects to our environment and food chain are hard to measure.

5. Economics of nuclear power

Okay so we’ve considered the radioactive waste and health effects risks but what about the economics?

Let’s get into it. As mentioned before, the cost to build nuclear power plants range from 2 billion dollars to 20 billion dollars per plant. I gave this large range because there is a potential for new technology to lower the cost. But conservatively speaking it will always be well over 10 billion dollars. Projects take typically between 7 to 10 years to complete. The lifetime of nuclear power plants are around 40 years , and can sometimes be increased by doing major repairs. This means if we were to split the build costs over the life-time, we would be paying up to 500 million per year.

Additionally, nuclear waste disposal costs for low level waste reportedly costs $AUD 3,760m³ and high level waste costs somewhere between $126,000/m³ and $377,000/ m³. Per plant with about 200m³ of low-level waste a year, and 6.7m³ of high level waste. This is about another $27million dollars a year to just dispose and store radioactive material. This also assumes a one off cost, which historically is not accurate due to leaks.

The clean-up of America’s compiled nuclear waste is estimated at $493.96 billion dollars. These high costs have meant waste has remained untouched and hasn’t moved to any deep facilities. For money that is spent each year, American’s pay roughly 6 billion dollars every year to deal with leaks and the high level waste from the Manhattan project. Similarly the clean-up of Fukushima is estimated by the Japanese government at $75 billion dollars.

When plants get to the end of their lifespan, decommissioning will cost up to $1 billion dollars

Additionally, as each plant uses 13 billion litres of water per year. Depending on where you live that’s roughly costing $26 million dollars for water each year (and that’s not including the flow on effects for water scarcity). For plants that use sea water instead of fresh water, costs will instead come from repairs and parts due to the corrosive nature of sea water.

For countries that reprocess uranium. Cost of building a reprocessing plant that’s capable of supporting the current consumption of nuclear power in the US, at $17 billion dollars. From there the ongoing operating costs to reprocess fuel for each nuclear facility would be roughly $9 million dollars a year (based on 30 tonnes of spent fuel per plant)

I’ve included two tables below to show a balanced argument for the range of estimate costs for using nuclear power per megawatt compared to other renewables. What is clear to me is that there are many alternative energy sources that are cheaper and cleaner than nuclear, in most cases by 2–3 times cheaper. A lot of the costs I listed above are also not included in these tables, so the numbers could be closer to 4–5 times cheaper.

Lastly the ongoing risk of nuclear proliferation cannot be measured accurately as a cost, beyond the numbers we have from the impact of Hiroshima in 1945, which ranged up to hundreds of billions of dollars.

6. Is new Nuclear technology the answer?

It wouldn’t be fair to the nuclear argument unless I also included future nuclear technology into the equation. Now this is where it gets interesting. Technology is always on the march forwards. And some of the generation IV nuclear technology on the way is mind blowing.

Jokes aside, there is some great tech on the way

Before we get into some of this new technology. Let’s quickly revisit what happens in a current nuclear reactor, and the process which ultimately makes me dislike current generation nuclear power.

During Nuclear fission, remember that U-235 typically becomes spent and turns into other by-products like U-238 after it has had roughly about 1% of it’s energy extracted. Any other energy that is inside is unable to be harnessed in the remaining U-238 form as it doesn’t fission and release energy in standard reactors when hit with neutrons. Remember we need flowing neutrons and U-235 to typically maintain fission in a reactor.

This is when generation IV breeder reactors come to play. Breeder reactors are able to extract a lot more than 1% of energy from uranium, in fact they’re able to theoretically extract 100%.

In fast breeder reactors, rather than trying to slow neutrons down to an optimal speed to cause fission in U-235. Instead these neutrons are left to their own devices and allowed to travel fast, this means even after U-235 changes into the previously useless U-238, the higher speed neutrons are actually able to cause U-238 to capture a neutron and by extension (on my highschool chemistry) turn into Plutonium. Let’s take a quick breath.

This is important because plutonium is also extremely good as fissioning and releasing energy. So in laymen’s terms a fast reactor is converting waste products like U-238 and turning them back into material that can fission and keep emitting energy to power the reactor.

This means that not only can we get more out of existing uranium, we can use existing nuclear waste to power these fast reactors. The concept is very appealing, and I definitely like the idea of using the present nuclear generations waste to power the next generation.

Anyone who has read this far will be able to quote this

Cores are also becoming safer and more energy efficient. Molten salt cores, mean less risk of explosion (although it does increase the chance of fire as it’s very reactive to air). Additionally other reactors are looking to run on Thorium instead of Uranium which is shown to be more energy efficient.

There is also new technology on the way that allows us to mine uranium from sea water meaning that uranium could last well beyond a thousand years.

The truth though is all this technology is still theoretical and we’re yet to see it commercialised, so this will not help us to reduce our carbon emission and energy needs any time soon.

7. Conclusion and wrap up.

In short nuclear power is not a renewable energy in its current form, nor is it better than alternative green energy sources or more economic. It also comes fraught with danger.

Additionally, I’ve learned that Australia has nearly one third of the world’s uranium resources, and continues to dump radioactive tailing waste in our own backyard. This has further strengthened my view that we have a responsibility to not only stop exporting uranium to encourage other countries to pursue alternative sustainable energy, we have a responsibility at home to ensure we don’t damage our own food chain and water resources.

It’s clear to me that our world is connected more closely than ever. Our health and well-being comes from our delicate environment, and by extension is always under threat while current nuclear power plants operate around the globe. While the risk of meltdowns is low, the ongoing storage of nuclear waste, maintenance and exponentially growing risks of containment breaches and the complications to our food chains, doesn’t outweigh the benefits of its energy density.

While the promise of new nuclear technology to recycle radioactive waste is exciting, it is still mostly theoretical and not commercially available. Not to mention it still takes equally as long to build as current nuclear power plants. This won’t help decarbonise our energy in the short term.

And we need to take immediate action now.