How I changed my mind on nuclear energy

Changing your mind is a skill. It is hard to learn. And having a tribe makes it harder.

In the early 2000s I was a full on greenie.

I hated nuclear. I worried about the climate. From 2005 to 2007 I did a master’s degree looking at the economics of individual consumption choices on greenhouse gas emissions. I worried that oil production would peak. Looking back now, I can see that I wanted to believe any disaster narrative circulating in my social group.

Now?

The world looks different.

It took years of training to learn how to make sense of the world. How do you really look at the data critically? How can you identify and accept those inconsistencies that reveal the limits of our knowledge?

I saw how the academic sausage was made.

Time has passed.

This means that predictions made decades ago can be tested. The climate catastrophes I expected have not come to pass. I have revised my views in line with reality.

Climate change, or what was once called global warming, and before that the greenhouse effect, is just one of many environmental issues. And for me, it is far down the list. Managing local land use conflicts, managing waterways to sustain water quality and wildlife populations, improving air quality, and ensuring the protection of wildlife conservation areas, are all much higher priorities for me in terms of their ability to create direct human benefits.

I have also seen the power of economic development as a force for good in many countries and realised that, for most of humanity, the idea that a slightly different climate could be beneficial in the future is down the bottom of their priority list. Stable local politics, physical infrastructure, and integration into global trade networks are what provide a high quality of life, much more so than investments in potentially, marginally changing climate patterns a century in the future.

I’ve changed my mind on a few topics over the years, and I might write about them in the future. Today I will tell the story of how I changed my mind on nuclear power.

First big realisation

In 2014 I had lunch with Professor Paul Frijters at the University of Queensland. He was my PhD supervisor and we were discussing how to go about gaining new insights into grey corruption (this research informed our book on Australian grey corruption called Rigged).

Grey corruption seemed like it was happening. But the why and how weren’t that clear. Many theories were inconsistent with each other, so you couldn’t just say “It’s a multivariate problem” or some other cop-out.

That day at lunch the subject of nuclear energy came up. I must have raised it as one of those topics where there seemed to be financial interests behind policy settings or at least the policy debate.

As Paul listened I recited the reasons I then believed about why nuclear was clearly a bad idea. I remember his reaction when I moved on to the next reason that contradicted the last one.

“Hold on. You can’t just pick and choose arguments you know. Can we stick with this one until we determine whether it makes sense and is consistent with what we know before we move on?”

I remember the feeling. It is a feeling.

He was right. I had jumped from one argument to another one that exactly contradicted it without even realising.

I remember the feeling. But I don’t remember the exact argument. Such is the power of emotion over logic.

If I had to guess, I think I was saying nuclear was too expensive. Then I think the next breath I said that renewables are cheaper from a welfare perspective because they lack negative greenhouse gas externalities. But then the same argument would apply to nuclear energy if we were being strictly consistent, and hence from a welfare perspective the high capital cost of nuclear could be justified by the lack of greenhouse gas externalities.

It dawned on me then that everyone else was not thinking logically either. And I realised that those who are happy to recite opposite arguments, like I was, aren’t a reliable source of information.

I remember the feeling. Of realising that what I “knew” was just what I had absorbed from others without conscious thought. I realised that I could “know” many wrong things.

It takes mental effort to embrace that feeling and not push back against it. Now when that happens to me and I get that feeling, I will try and take a long walk to digest the new information. I think about what other things I “know” about the world rely on the wrong assumption or inconsistent logic and need to also be questioned. It takes concentrated thought and mental effort to put aside the emotions that drive your biology and what you naturally want to think.

But it’s a skill I have worked on since that time.

Now, when applying that sort of thinking to the problem of greenhouse gas emissions and their effect on the climate, it seems logical to me that direct and effective solutions make more sense. If we are in the business of managing the climate, things like geo-engineering and using emissions-free electricity generation that works on a large scale, like nuclear, both seem obvious options.¹

Yet the two most direct actions to take if your concern about the climate is genuine often do not make the top of the list of policy options. It makes me wonder how much of the conversation is happening with emotional and not logical thinking, as was the case for me.

Second big realisation

In 2018 I was working with The Australia Institute. The Conservation Council in South Australia commissioned a report from us about the economics of the proposed radioactive waste management facility.

So I went about studying what nuclear waste exists, how it is currently stored, and the experiences abroad dealing with waste.

I had expected to find an intractable problem. Helen Caldicott’s books were triggered in my memory.

But I found the opposite.

You will see from the report that the real economic story was that a nuclear waste dump would be very small and cheap, providing little local economic benefit. And the reason for this is that the waste is not a big deal. The image below is from a previous design proposal for an Australian radioactive waste facility. It is a small industrial shed with security. Not much more.

The Conservation Council wanted some economic analysis to demonstrate how bad such a facility would be for the local area. One of my clarifying questions to them was: “Where should we keep radioactive waste?”

Their response? Sydney. At the Lucas Heights nuclear facility.

It made no sense to me. Being near nuclear waste was thought to be very bad, but their preferred solution was to have waste stored near thousands of Sydney residents. It was another one of those moments of inconsistency that made me realise I was dealing with emotions and not logic.

I tweeted about this strange and inconsistent reasoning recently.

During that research project, I looked at the experience with nuclear waste in Europe, Canada and the United States. I realised that many storage facilities for low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste exist and are operated cheaply.

But what about high-level waste from spent fuel?

Well, that’s even more interesting. Used nuclear fuel from Australia’s medical isotope reactor at Lucas Heights had already been shipped to France to be recycled to reuse the uranium materials that still contained an enormous amount of energy (hence the radiation fears). Fuel waste is a valuable product that could be used for future nuclear energy generation.

So storing spent fuel at the site of reactors makes sense because a) the volume is low, and b) it is a future source of fuel.

And the more times you use the fuel, the faster its radioactivity decays and the shorter the storage safety concerns.

Other realisations

I don’t want to go on and on. Feel free to leave comments and questions. But here are some other things that helped me change my view.

1. The experience in Germany of closing nuclear reactors. This had the effect of boosting greenhouse gas emissions, increasing electricity prices because of a renewed reliance on coal, and subsequently decreasing local air quality.

2. People say things like “Would you want a nuclear reactor in your suburb?” But then they proceed to holiday in France, Japan, and the United States in towns and cities close to nuclear reactors and never think twice. And of course, battles over where to put wind farms and solar are heating up too.

3. The Fukushima meltdown I think proved how safe nuclear is, not how scared we should be of it.

4. People have said for 20 years that nuclear is too slow and expensive. And yet it took only 14 years for the United Arab Emirates to decide to build nuclear power and get four reactors up and running at Barakah by contracting a Korean nuclear construction firm.
   
   It is also true that you can build a nuclear fleet mostly in parallel, with many facilities under construction at different stages at the same time. Had we decided on nuclear 20 years ago, we would be in the middle of a massive commissioning program today. It’s not too late now, is it?

Many topics are emotional. Many are also political. So we have trouble asking basic questions of logic.

But doing this is a skill that you can learn if you put in the effort to notice your own inconsistencies.

---

Here are a couple of other relevant energy and nuclear power articles.

First, from the Blueprint Institute, is an analysis of nuclear in a low-cost electricity grid.

Second, is an FET article from Aidan Morrison from 2023 about the missing costs in our current Australian plans to shift to a near fully renewables grid.

Thanks for reading.

1. Geo-engineering seems a taboo topic. But it shouldn’t be. We always physically engineer our environments to make them better for humans—cooling and heating buildings, building dams to manage flood risk, and much more. Why would the climate and weather not also be managed in a way that benefits humans? And if a warming climate is hugely costly, then maybe cooling it has huge benefits that we can get for a small investment.