Turning of the Tide: Nuclear Energy’s Moment at COP28

“No Net Zero Without Nuclear!” From a marginalized outsider, nuclear energy has been given a seat at the table. But is it too much or not enough?

"We know from science, the reality of facts and evidence that we cannot achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 without nuclear power,” said US Climate Envoy John Kerry at COP 28 in Dubai earlier in the month. 22 countries representing 44% of the world’s GDP signed a pledge to triple nuclear energy globally by 2050, eventually to be joined by 2 others. Like the other nuclear activists at COP 28, I was absolutely jubilant.

All aboard with the Decouple Media Team!

There were quite a few of us from the US, Canada, all over Europe, Africa, but the one that made the most impact might have been young Will Shackel, a 17-year-old Australian activist who managed to buttonhole French President Emmanuel Macron in the Blue Zone and got him to say on camera that Australia should lift the ban on nuclear energy. The chance interaction was of course caught on camera, and made headlines back in Australia.

Such is the power of COP. For all the cynicism and eye-rolling directed at it, COP is the premier event where leaders, experts and activists from all over the world come together to tackle climate change, and things happen here.

Through some chance conversations with attendees far more senior and experienced than myself, I slowly got a sense of how the event I’m at is but the culmination of a whole year of effort led by the presiding country. So much pre-negotiation has to be done to make sure that all the parties at the table are ready to make the pledges that are announced with fanfare.

There was a bumper crop of such pledges and announcements at this COP. In addition to the nuclear tripling pledge, we had the “double down and triple up” pledge to increase efficiency and triple the global capacity in renewables by 2030. Other notable announcements included the first Global Stocktake and the Loss and Damages fund. Even more agreements, especially in the realm of financing developments, didn’t make the headlines but will surely be consequential in deployment, I was told.

For nuclear energy, this is the COP where it finally got a seat at the table. Nuclear wasn’t absent from past COPs, but it was always rather marginalized. In addition to the tripling pledge, nuclear energy made its appearance in the final draft of the first Global Stocktake side by side with renewables, as a technology to be accelerated.

No Net Zero without Nuclear

Considering the desiccated state of the world’s nuclear supply chains, the tripling by 2050 pledge is in fact a huge ask. How big? Take a look at the graph below:

I don’t think the world wanted nuclear power for decarbonization until they realized they how badly they needed it. “The models that exclude nuclear energy from net zero scenarios costs €80 billion more per year by 2050,” said Lindsey Walter of the think tank Third Way. “There is no net zero without nuclear power. This is now accepted the world over,” said Minister for Nuclear and Networks Andrew Bowie of the UK. “I would dare to say that in Europe and also globally there is no path to 1.5°C warming without an increasing role of nuclear energy,” said Finnish Minister of Climate and the Environment, Kai Mykkanen.

“For too long nuclear energy has been ignored. We are repairing a major mistake, it’s long overdue,” said French Minister of the Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher.

When countries started making plans to go net zero, they realized to their chagrin that renewables-only plans often saw their emissions going in the wrong direction.“Countries started coming to us for solutions,” said Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) Director-General William Magwood. The NEA advocated for the tripling pledge for years and finally it happened. Of course, the new-found respect for energy security in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was an additional impetus.

“Why so unambitious?”

As daunting as the tripling pledge is from the supply chain point of view, you can also argue that it’s hardly ambitious. In fact, that’s exactly what prominent Australian renewables investor Simon Holmes à Court did at a party full of pro-nuclear activists celebrating the breakthrough announcements. “Why is it so unambitious,” he said, seeming to imply that if nuclear isn’t going to do more than triple off its current capacity by 2050, it’s hardly going to be a big factor in Net Zero. Or maybe he actually did say it? Not sure…had quite a few margaritas.

Holmes à Court’s logic goes like this: nuclear energy accounts for about 10% of global electricity generation now. But in order to get to Net Zero by 2050, it’s understood that we have to “electrify everything,” meaning the present day grid will probably have to triple in size as well. This means that the tripling pledge, at best, just leaves nuclear power hanging on to status quo: exactly still at 10%.

This is a point that I actually think more Nukebros need to internalize. Even if tomorrow, with a magic wand, we made everybody in the world as fanatically pro-nuclear as us, it might still be impossible to build nuclear power plants in the quantity we need to decarbonize in time for 2050. It absolutely is up to renewables to do the bulk of saving the world’s bacon from a sizzling fate sooner rather than later.

Having said that, decarbonization is not a race with a finish line at 2050. I really like Rauli Partanen’s take on this: “If we can triple nuclear by 2050, we can then double it again by the following decade. Why? Because we can’t triple it with how we have been building nuclear recently. We will have engaged in serious serial manufacturing, which we can continue and accelerate.”

Miracle in the desert

As with so much to do with climate change, the hard work left to do for the nuclear industry remains daunting. But a visit to the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant provided a powerful and timely reminder that good things are worth waiting for. Is nuclear power too slow? It’s certainly a lot slower than throwing up some solar. The first unit of the Barakah NPP took about a decade to come online. But when the 4th unit start producing electricity early next year, the plant would account for a massive 25% of the grid in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). By building one (admittedly massive) facility, the UAE just created more low-carbon power than all the turbines in Denmark.

Bus ride to Barakah: 5 hours. Memories: Forever.

I’d love to be proven wrong on this, but it’s far from certain whether the world will achieve Net Zero in 2050. Investing in the development of a stable bulk source of low-carbon energy seems a no-regret decision, and something that our children and grandchildren will be grateful for, whether or not it bears fruit in 2050 or beyond.

In my mind, the important thing about the tripling pledge is that it points us in the right direction and puts nuclear on a level playing field for things like financing, something that will surely come under serious discussion next year at COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan.