Should nuclear power be central to climate strategy?

"Nuclear is the most underused tool we have."

Modern reactors offer the highest energy density and lowest lifecycle emissions of any large-scale source, and their safety record per terawatt-hour is better than every fossil source and competitive with wind and solar. The fleet that France built between 1974 and 1989 decarbonized its grid in fifteen years — faster than any country has ever decarbonized by any other means. Small modular reactors, advanced Gen-IV designs, and factory-built construction promise to compress timelines and de-risk capital, while existing reactors can be life-extended for decades at a fraction of the cost of new build. Dismissing nuclear in the 2020s repeats the mistake Germany made in the 2010s: shutting down zero-carbon assets and replacing them, in practice, with gas and coal.

"Nuclear's track record on cost and schedule is poor."

Western nuclear projects routinely overrun budgets by two to five times and finish a decade late — Vogtle, Hinkley Point C, Olkiluoto, and Flamanville are not outliers, they are the norm. Capital is finite and time is the binding constraint: every dollar and every year spent on nuclear is a dollar and a year not spent on faster-deploying renewables that are already cheaper per MWh in most markets. The SMR story has been promised for two decades and remains a slide deck. Until a Gen-III+ or SMR project lands on time and on budget in a Western jurisdiction, treating nuclear as a serious climate tool is wishful thinking dressed up as physics.

"The LCOE math depends entirely on financing assumptions."

At a 3% cost of capital, nuclear is cost-competitive with most alternatives over a 60-year asset life. At 10%, it is uneconomic almost everywhere. The dominant variable is not the technology — it is how risk is allocated between developers, utilities, taxpayers, and ratepayers. Public financing, regulated asset base models, contracts-for-difference, and stable build pipelines that allow learning-curve effects are how France, South Korea, and China have delivered nuclear at a fraction of US or UK costs. The honest framing is that nuclear's 'cost problem' is largely a financing and procurement problem, not a physics problem — but solving it requires political commitment most democracies have not made.

"We need every clean MWh — but waste and water matter."

Climate urgency means dropping ideological opposition to existing nuclear plants and being open to new ones where they fit. But spent fuel storage remains politically unresolved in every major OECD country, and reactors are water-intensive in a warming climate where many sites have already had to derate during summer heatwaves. Uranium mining, while small in volume, carries real local environmental costs. Nuclear should complement an aggressive renewable buildout, not replace it — and certainly not be used as a political excuse to slow down wind, solar, transmission, and efficiency, which remain the fastest tools we have.

"Nuclear capacity is strategic infrastructure."

Nations that lose nuclear expertise cede a critical industrial base. Russia and China together account for roughly 70% of reactors currently under construction globally and dominate fuel-cycle services. Every reactor exported abroad is a 60-year diplomatic and economic relationship. The US, UK, France, Japan, and South Korea face a one-generation window to maintain a credible domestic nuclear industry — once supply chains, regulators, and skilled workforces decay below critical mass, they are extraordinarily expensive to rebuild. Energy sovereignty, defense industrial overlap, and non-proliferation leverage all depend on this.