IAEA and IEA position nuclear power for 'comeback' role in the fight against climate change

The prospect of using more nuclear power as a clean energy source is having a moment at COP27 as leaders, experts and others tout climate technology solutions.

For decades, the debate over the safety and environmental concerns about nuclear reactors – and the risk that the spread of nuclear technology can lead to more nuclear weapons – clouded the industry's efforts to promote its use more widely.

Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster added to worries about the dangers that reactors pose to communities and the longterm radioactive waste they generate.

The meltdown in 2011 occurred after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused a total power failure and the nuclear plant’s cooling systems shut down, leaking radioactive material. An estimated 18,500 were killed or went missing after the earthquake and tsunami; another 160,000 were displaced.

The world's worst nuclear accident – the 1986 explosion of the reactor at the Chernobyl plant in what was then the Soviet Union – killed 30 workers in the blast or due to acute radiation sickness. The World Health Organization estimated at least 9,000 more people could die of cancer and leukemia in contaminated areas.

But the U.N. climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt gives industry and agency leaders an opportunity to champion nuclear power's possibilities. Some banana-dressed promoters handed out samples of the fruit explaining the potassium in a single banana exceeds the radiation dose from a year spent living next to a reactor.

Two leading organizations that are promoting the benefits of atomic power as a low-carbon energy source at the summit said nations increasingly view it as a potential way to meet their climate obligations under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Nations seeking 'guidance'

The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency, Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Paris-based International Energy Agency teamed up at COP27 to promote nuclear power's use among other lower carbon-emitting technologies such as zero-emission hydrogen fuels and wind, solar and geothermal sources.

“Increasingly states with little to no nuclear experience approach us for guidance on meeting their climate goals with nuclear energy,” said IAEA's Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi.

“We all know that the challenges posed by climate change are very, very difficult,” he said. “This is why nuclear is here, because nuclear has a place at the table, because nuclear is part of the solution towards a decarbonized energy mix in the world.”

Nuclear power from about 440 reactors globally accounts for 10% of the world's electricity, and its use has steadily grown, rising more than 13% in the past decade, IAEA says. That's particularly true in China, which has overtaken France to become the second largest nuclear power producer after the United States.

“Nuclear power is making a comeback," said IEA's Executive Secretary Fatih Birol.

His agency reported in June that nuclear power is now the second largest source of low emissions power after hydropower, with nuclear plants in 32 countries. But it said almost two-thirds of today’s nuclear generating capacity comes from plants more than 30 years old, since many were built in the aftermath of 1970s oil shocks.