Going Nuclear by Tim Gregory: Want to save the planet? GO NUCLEAR

Tim Gregory works in what he calls ‘one of the most chemically exotic square miles on the planet’.

He is a scientist at the UK’s National Nuclear Laboratory at Sellafield. So, it is no surprise that his new book offers a deeply researched and mostly persuasive argument in favour of nuclear power and its benefits.

If we want to renounce fossil fuels and clean up our energy systems, ‘splitting atoms of uranium inside nuclear reactors is our best bet at reaching net zero by 2050’.

Yet, as he acknowledges, profound suspicion of the nuclear industry is rooted in the public mind.

And, in what he sees as an ironic contradiction, those people who are most concerned about climate change are the very ones who are least supportive of nuclear power.

This anxiety was not always so widespread. In the 1950s, nuclear power was often seen as the future we should happily embrace. In Britain, Calder Hall, the country’s first atomic power station, was opened by Queen Elizabeth II ‘with pride’.

The town of Workington became one of the first in the world where people’s washing machines, record players and other electrical appliances were driven by nuclear electricity.

It was not only the Queen who was enthused by the then new technology. Gregory tells the oddly charming story of Muriel Howorth, who became a staunch advocate of nuclear power at the age of 62 after reading a book she’d borrowed from her local library.

She went on to found the Ladies’ Atomic Energy Club and to write a pantomime called Isotopia, which included characters such as Isotope, Neutron and Atom Man. In 1950, it was staged in London with members of the Ladies’ Atomic Energy Club playing all the roles. She had hopes of a performance at the Albert Hall but, sadly, this was never to be.

A 21st-century Muriel Howorth seems unlikely to emerge. Nuclear power has lost the glamour it may have possessed in the 1950s. It is more likely today to elicit alarm and anxiety. Gregory puts much of contemporary worry about the nuclear industry down to what he calls ‘radiophobia’ – an irrational fear of radiation.

Popular culture has played its part in warping society’s perception of the subject. The idea of atomic bombs has become entwined with our notions of the nuclear industry. Gregory endeavours to get beyond the mushroom clouds of our imagination.

As he points out, all kinds of unexpected objects are radioactive to some extent. Potassium-40 emits beta and gamma radiation. Bananas and potatoes both contain potassium, so are therefore radioactive.

‘Biology,’ he notes, ‘unfolds against a background of radioactivity.’ All of us spend our lives ‘bathed in radiation’. The only way we could avoid it would be by adopting a highly impractical programme of not eating, drinking or even breathing. ‘You can’t have radiation-free anything,’ Gregory writes. ‘Background radiation is about as ubiquitous and as harmless as it gets.’

What about the dangers of nuclear waste and the difficulties of disposing of it? Gregory argues that these are greatly exaggerated.

The paraphernalia in his lab – gloves, test-tubes, biros – is all classified as nuclear waste because it comes from Sellafield. Most of it is ‘far less radioactive than a banana’.

‘Low-level’ nuclear waste accounts for just one per cent of the radioactivity in all nuclear waste but 87 per cent of its volume. The most dangerous type of ‘high-level’ waste, by contrast, represents 0.1 per cent of the total volume of nuclear waste but contains 95 per cent of its radioactivity.

All the high-level waste from the past 70 years of the nuclear industry would fit inside a medium-sized concert hall.

Figures such as these may well be reassuring, but Gregory is on less sure ground when he turns to the major disasters that have struck the industry over the decades. Again he turns to statistics to argue that we should not be over-anxious.

‘Nuclear’s safety record is blotted by a small number of rare, high-visibility events,’ he acknowledges, but it’s ‘about as safe as wind and solar, and it’s tens or hundreds times safer than fossil fuels’. Air pollution from the latter kills as many people every six hours, Gregory states, as nuclear power has ever done.

He acknowledges the seriousness of Chernobyl, which he describes unequivocally as ‘the worst disaster in the history of nuclear power’, but he argues that we should not overestimate its long-term effects.

The accident at Chernobyl happened because of a combination of factors – an unusual design of reactor, operators who broke the rules, Soviet-era corruption – that is extremely unlikely to occur again.

He also uses an array of statistics and scientific studies to show fears of ongoing health risks are exaggerated. A study from 2019 found that cancer rates in regions of Ukraine close to Chernobyl were no higher than the national average.

Not everyone will buy Gregory’s take on Chernobyl, but he’s more convincing on the 2011 Fukushima disaster, where an earthquake triggered a tsunami that caused three nuclear units to explode. Twenty thousand people died due to the natural disasters but only one person died as a result of the radiation, and a UN scientific committee found no evidence that the radiation caused an increase in any type of cancer.

Arguments over the dangers of nuclear power will continue. What seems inarguable is its potential.

There is, Gregory writes, ‘as much nuclear energy in a gram of uranium as there is chemical energy in more than a tonne of coal’. If you powered a lightbulb with a gram of coal, it would give you 15 minutes of light; a gram of uranium would light up the bulb for 30 years. As he bluntly states, ‘Net zero is impossible without nuclear power.’

Renewables such as wind and solar have important roles to play but alone they cannot possibly satisfy a society that needs on-demand electricity. And the demand is growing.

Europe today generates a fifth of its electricity from nuclear. It’s the biggest source of emissions-free electricity, bigger than solar and wind combined.

Gregory reports on what he calls ‘the flatpack furniture of the nuclear world’ – small modular reactors that take up the space of 5.5 football pitches. He envisages a future in which every large town will have one of these smaller reactors and there will be several in every major city worldwide.

‘Nuclear,’ he writes, ‘will become routine.’ Gregory is passionate in his belief that nuclear power will solve the world’s energy problems. Not all readers will be so evangelical but his book presents a strong, carefully argued case for his ideas.