There is an economic line that splits the world in two. On one side of this line are the wealthy countries which make up the global North. On the other are the developing and least developed countries that together constitute the global South. Which side of this line you live on has a large impact on how close you probably are to a nuclear power plant.
From another perspective this line is actually a cliff. The Northern countries have for decades benefited from high energy use and resource extraction and enjoyed elevated quality of life as a result. Those in the South are hungry to join the abundance club, but find the development ladder is now being pulled up out of reach. Climate change, they are told, means they need to limit their fossil fuel consumption. Lack of readiness, they are told, means that they can’t build nuclear power plants.
Elites at international bodies – such as academic institutions, think tanks, financing institutions, multilateral organisations – offer strong support for renewables and pretend that they are enough, but of course they are not. Africa, Asia and South America deserve more than just intermittent energy ‘toys’. They deserve a reliable, resilient energy system made up of multiple diverse sources of generation, just like their wealthier counterparts. Their sovereign rights to determine their own energy mix must also be respected.
Adding insult to injury, many of these countries have helped supply the resources that enabled the North to flourish. To expect them to forgo developing them for their own benefit because of largely rich-world created environmental issues would be the height of hypocrisy.
This is in truth a wicked problem. Sustainability issues are real and many people in the South care about them too, but the stakes are also more personal. It is easy call for dramatic climate action when you have a MacBook, infinite internet and a caffe latte in hand, it’s another thing entirely when you are experiencing blackouts on a daily basis.
This, by the way is the reality in much of Africa today. In Accra, for example, daily load shedding for hour long stretches has become the norm. The phenomenon has its own name – Dumsor (off-on) – and become a national joke after the president described the problem as solved, only for the power to go off mid-broadcast.
Climate resilience is now every bit as important as climate mitigation and this entails energy resilience. This is especially true for the countries of the Global South.
Those working in the energy sector know that climate change and economic equality are two sides of the same coin. You can’t solve one without also solving the other. Energy usage is more-or-less directly correlated to GDP, and the energy system as a whole dominates global greenhouse gas emissions.
This climate calculus is simple and remains fundamentally unaltered, even acknowledging that some countries have made progress with energy ‘decoupling’.
Limiting climate change means simultaneously increasing energy access while decreasing energy emissions. That IS the climate challenge in a nutshell.
It is for this reason that the financial campaign to divest from fossil fuels and other polluting industries in the South rings hollow. If financial leaders and policy makers really want to improve sustainability then rather than seeking to make polluting projects more costly and difficult, they need to make clean projects cheaper and easier.
By way of specific example, the World Bank deserves more praise for removing its exclusion on hydropower projects than it does for trying to wind down fossil fuel investment. However, the fact that the World Bank and most other development banks continue to maintain an exclusion on nuclear energy development is an appalling moral and intellectual failure.
Exclusions against nuclear energy may have been understandable in the past, but this was before climate impacts became the norm and climate concerns rose
to the top of the international agenda. Granted, some influential countries remain anti-nuclear, but this mindset is changing. Even Germany may end up re-visiting its phase-out decision in time.
Nuclear – the sustainability solution
Understandable or not, exclusions on nuclear power have never been justifiable on sustainability grounds. The IPCC has for decades been clear on the low-carbon nature of nuclear energy and this was never a point of genuine contention. In 2021, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe released a report highlighting how nuclear can (both directly and indirectly) help countries in achieving all 17 of the sustainable development goals. Nuclear energy is nothing short of the sustainability technology par-excellence.
Even acknowledging some high-profile failures, the industry’s performance on waste management and safety is exemplary. High standards mean that nuclear energy should really be the poster child for the ESG community rather than the pariah it is still mostly treated as. If only every industry boasted as strong a safety culture and commitment to environmental stewardship!
These are qualities the nuclear industry is rightly proud of. However, it should be ashamed of how inequitably nuclear facilities and benefits are distributed. Nuclear energy fundamentally remains privileged rich-person technology. Why are the barriers to obtaining nuclear energy so high?
Established nuclear countries arguably do more to slow and restrict nuclear energy expansion to newcomers than they do to enable it. Trade restrictions are the default, based on non-proliferation concerns. Would-be newcomer countries are expected (ironically by countries that live under a nuclear weapons aegis) to prove themselves if they wish to have access to existing supply chains, materials and expertise.
Nuclear power technology is traditionally large and capitally intensive. This is reasonable for sizable economies with expansive grids but ill-suited to small
or fragile economies. Financing is available from only a very narrow range of sources, and often with geopolitical strings attached, meaning that nuclear plants are not currently a viable economic proposition for many.
Strict safety governance and regulatory standards are also demanded, along with a level of forward planning that no other energy source requires. As we all know, a nuclear accident anywhere is an accident everywhere. Yet one has to wonder if the perfect has become the enemy of the good-enough. Would nuclear energy ever have become established in North America and Europe if today’s standards were insisted upon at the very beginning?
The IAEA outlines steps that countries need to take before starting nuclear construction. The Milestones Approach is truly an edifice of structured preparation,
and yet in another way it is also a handbrake on the accelerator of global nuclear energy deployment. It should not be exempt from critical re-examination.
Of course nuclear issues are genuine and require real solutions, but who exactly determined that they are of greater importance than the crises of equality, energy access, climate change, and resource availability that the world is now facing? The simple fact is that nuclear bodies are often moored in the past and slow to adapt despite the climate and sustainability rhetoric. They therefore risk sinking into the same irrelevance as the anti-nuclear arguments (and organisations) which they were originally shaped to ameliorate.
These institutions should be reshaped with one clear and overwhelming priority – that of dramatically accelerating the uptake of nuclear energy by newcomer countries as a sustainability imperative. In this effort they should be wholeheartedly supported by international financial institutions and multilateral organisations.
Perhaps this journey has already begun, but if so this is not visible from the outside. Things are changing too slowly. Innovative approaches are needed to shake the tree and bring an end to nuclear energy disparity. Initiatives such as the proposed International Bank for Nuclear Infrastructure are vital and deserve unreserved support. All efforts to speed the development of nuclear infrastructure in the countries that want it should be embraced.
By the year 2050, 25% of the world’s population is expected to live in Africa, but what fraction of the global nuclear fleet do you think the continent will host by then? Seal that answer in an envelope. Now answer the question, what fraction should it be?
Author: David Hess, Senior VP, DeepGeo
