Should we go all in on nuclear energy?: The Story
New to climate change
73 deaths versus 24,600
Deaths per terawatt-hour. Nuclear: 73, including Chernobyl and Fukushima. Coal: 24,600. Oil: 18,400. Natural gas: 2,800. Rooftop solar: 440, mostly installers falling off roofs.
France built fifty-six reactors between 1970 and 2000. Seventy percent of its electricity is nuclear. Grid carbon intensity: one-sixth of Germany’s. Germany, next door, shut its reactors after Fukushima and fired up lignite. In 2023, German electricity produced six times the CO2 per kilowatt-hour.
The pro-nuclear camp recites these numbers the way a doctor recites a dosage. They consider the last fifty years of anti-nuclear activism the most expensive environmental mistake in human history.
Keiko’s house
Then there is a family seven kilometers from Fukushima Daiichi. Keiko Ogura was making lunch when the roof of Reactor Building 1 blew off. TEPCO’s own internal documents showed the company had been warned about the tsunami risk and downgraded it. Her house is still in the exclusion zone. The house is fine. She cannot live in it. The anti-nuclear position is not irrational fear. It is the observation that safe enough
is always authored by someone who does not live downwind.
The grid at 6:47 p.m.
Standing in the control room on a January evening — solar output zero, wind dropped to nothing, twenty million households turning on heating — is a portfolio pragmatist who finds the entire debate a luxury. The grid does not care about ideology. It cares about dispatchable power — energy you can summon when you need it, not when the weather provides it.
And walking the fence line of a proposed reactor site, a community organizer from the environmental justice camp notices the siting always seems to land on the same zip codes — the ones that already have the chemical plant, the landfill, and the lowest voter turnout.
The convergence is narrow but real: nuclear is low-carbon, the climate crisis is existential, baseload power matters. From that shared ground the paths diverge so sharply they barely look like the same conversation. One leads to a French-style buildout. Another to distributed renewables with storage never demonstrated at scale. A third to the portfolio. A fourth asks who lives next to whatever gets built.
The bottleneck is not technology. It is the inability to make decisions that involve tradeoffs nobody wants to name. Somebody’s backyard. Somebody’s aquifer. Somebody’s children.
Perspectives:
- Pro-nuclear
- Anti-nuclear
- Portfolio pragmatists
- Environmental justice