Even the world’s most precious environmentalist must yield to reality.
With millions of Europeans facing a cold winter with inadequate supplies of electricity and natural gas, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg says nuclear power isn’t so bad after all. In her eyes, nuclear power is better than the alternative, which is burning coal.
Thunberg told German public broadcaster ARD that it was “a very bad idea” to burn coal when nuclear power is already in place. When she was asked if Germany should keep its three remaining power plants operating once the current problem is past, Thunberg said, “It depends. We don’t know what will happen after this.”
Thunberg was a media star when she was younger and more naive. Now that she’s 19 and finishing high school, she’s learning that life is complicated and sometimes you must go with what you don’t want until you can get what you can.
But don’t think Thunberg, whose new project “The Climate Book” will be available Oct. 27, is leading the pack; she’s following it.
Developments around the world this year show that climate change activists realize renewables aren’t able to supply baseload power demands for their nation’s grids. As transportation moves from fossil fuels to battery power — batteries don’t produce electricity; they only store what has been made elsewhere — the demand for electricity will increase further. At the moment, the two leading producers of carbon-free electricity worldwide are hydropower and nuclear power.
Japan had been moving away from nuclear power since the Fukushima disaster in 2011, but it has begun to reverse course. In May, the Green Party in Finland endorsed nuclear power.
According to the Washington Post, Germany is different from other nations in western Europe in that it disdained nuclear power in favor of making itself reliant on natural gas from Russia. Since the war started in Ukraine, Germans are beginning to see the problems with that strategy.
But even West Virginia is conceding that nuclear power may be necessary to supply its future energy needs. The construction and operation of nuclear power plants was illegal in this state until this year when the legislature removed that prohibition from state law.
If small modular reactors pan out the way their developers say they will, nuclear power might be back in Germany’s future and elsewhere. Here in the United States, Big Business might provide the momentum for the growth of nuclear power.
If climate change activists are ready to accept nuclear power as a carbon-free alternative to coal and natural gas, and if small modular reactors are feasible for widespread deployment in the next decade, large corporations will be ready to accept them. The ESG (environment, social justice and governance) movement has made inroads into the top levels of corporate leadership. Companies are willing to pay a premium for electricity if they can say it enables them to do their job in protecting against climate change. Solar and wind sources can provide only so much power.
For more carbon-free power, particularly in places such as Appalachia where geography works against wind and solar, nuclear power could be the answer.
That won’t be good news for West Virginia’s coal industry. If demand for power increases faster than new sources can come online, and if coal can remain cost-competitive with nuclear, and if coal power can withstand tighter environmental regulations, coal could survive.
That’s a lot of ifs, so we will have to see what happens over the next decade in the competition among coal, gas, nuclear and renewables for dominance in power generation.
Jim Ross is development and opinion editor of The Herald-Dispatch in Huntington. His email address is [email protected].
Jim Ross is development and opinion editor of The Herald-Dispatch in Huntington. His email address is jross@
hdmediallc.com.
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