At the end of one year and the start of the next, thoughts typically turn to the year ahead, but for all the wrong reasons the focus right now is on 2024. The latest analysis from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has confirmed that last year was the warmest on record and that the average global temperature exceeded 1.5°C above its pre-industrial level. The 1.5°C threshold is, of course, widely considered the critical temperature rise above which catastrophic impacts are expected to become widespread. The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) had concluded in 2023 that “human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe.” There is certainly plenty of evidence that significant adverse effects are already with us. Above 1.5°C though, those impacts are expected to be far worse. At 2°C warming, for example, melting sea ice in polar regions is forecast to produce an additional 10cm of sea level rise, massively increasing the risk of widespread inundation.
Nuclear power is clearly one of the solutions to meet burgeoning global energy demands without the enormous carbon footprint associated with fossil fuels. There is a problem though given the challenge of both financing nuclear assets and delivering them in a timely way. It takes just a few years to go from a greenfield site to a fully operational gas turbine power plant, whereas development of a conventional light water reactor would see nuclear still very much in the conceptual stage at two years. SMRs and advanced reactors hold promise in delivering a much-accelerated development timeframe but these are technologies that are still emerging. Even the most optimistic projections do not foresee commercial roll out of these smaller reactors before 2030 and unfortunately nuclear does have a habit of confounding positive expectations. These challenges are’t necessarily something the industry can do anything about though. The supremacy of safety considerations and the importance of public acceptance make the regulatory and planning burden on nuclear far more difficult than any other type of energy production, even waste incineration plants seem to have an easier time.
There is perhaps a solution though. Like many issues, throwing cash at a problem can often help and it’s easy to see how substantial increases in, for example, the funding of regulatory bodies to build up the workforce and deliver more robust approaches to timely assessments could help. Educational programmes to expound the benefits of nuclear or funds to provide host community investment could incentivise acceptance or at least go some way to ameliorating decades of bad press.
As to where this money will come from, there is perhaps a solution at hand there too. Late last year the European Commission’s Modernisation Fund disbursed €2.7bn to support 39 investment projects across eight Member States designed to meet 2030 climate and clean energy targets. The source of this largesse, the second such funding tranche of 2024, was the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). This scheme has provided more than €15bn of energy transition funding for the modernisation fund since its inception in 2021. Launched in 2005, the EU ETS operates on the simple principle that polluters are required to pay for their emissions. Covering electricity and heat generation, industrial manufacturing, aviation and shipping, the world’s first and largest carbon market brings emissions down while generating revenues able to fund other, perhaps less financially attractive, aspects of the energy transition.
Expanding such a scheme globally and making it more costly to emit carbon will certainly be politically challenging, but the actual cost – today – of a climate crisis that is clearly already here should easily put that into perspective. Making polluters fund accelerated nuclear development might seem like a step too far for some. But for those who believe nuclear is part of the solution, well, it is a nice idea.
