Can we trust nuclear power again?

0:00Today in Focus Host:This is The Guardian.

0:08Today in Focus Host:Today, are we entering a new golden age for nuclear power?

0:23Today in Focus Host:Most people have been agreed for ages now. Burning fossil fuels is bad. And anyway, they will have run out by the end of the century. For maybe 20 years now, it's all been about renewables. Wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectricity. Sustainable forms of energy that won't cost the planet. So when Ed Miliband's Department for Energy Security and Net Zero was awarded a 16 % budget increase last month, you'd be forgiven for expecting more windmills, more heat pumps, electric cars for all. Not quite.

1:00Dr Tim Gregory:For all these reasons, the government is taking decisive steps today to usher in a new golden age of nuclear for Britain. Yep, nuclear.

1:13Today in Focus Host:That old, new technology, which rather lost its shine after Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island. There is no chance of the UK meeting its climate obligations without nuclear, said Miliband. And it's not just us. The Danish parliament recently voted to overturn a 40-year ban on nuclear power. Belgium also announced an end to its nuclear phase-out. Belgium has reversed plans to phase out nuclear power, which had been in place for two decades. Part of a bigger trend across Europe, with countries like the Netherlands, Sweden and Italy rethinking nuclear power to improve energy security and tackle climate change.

1:55Today in Focus Host:And in the US, perhaps most surprisingly of all, there's a plan to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island to help power Microsoft data centres. Rising from the banks of the Susquehanna River sits a three mile island in Pennsylvania, where America's nuclear renaissance is about to be in full swing. But with each nuclear plant costing tens of billions of pounds, and the waste remaining radioactive for 100 ,000 years, is this really the technology of the future? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus, should we trust nuclear power again?

2:37Today in Focus Host:Tim Gregory, Dr Tim Gregory, You're a nuclear scientist working at the United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory at Sellafield in Cumbria. And you're also the author of Going Nuclear, How the Atom Will Save the World. Tell me, how did you end up being such an evangelist for all things nuclear? Because it seems quite a retro thing for a young chap like you to be into. I think you're only 32, I believe.

3:01Dr Tim Gregory:Yeah, I am. I was just obsessed with the idea of atoms as a kid. I remember reading about them and sort of starting to get my head around them for the first time and thinking like, what? Like everything is made from these tiny, tiny particles and they come in 92 different varieties and they go together in different combinations to make the world. How amazing is that? How cool is that? I guess it's a bit like music. You can't explain your music taste. I just can't explain my fascination and love for science. and as I've grown older, become a bit more worldly, take more of an interest in politics, in human development, in the environment, I'm really, really of the mind that science and technology are two of the best tools that we have for creating a more prosperous world sustainably and nuclear power fits that remit perfectly.

3:53Today in Focus Host:Tell me, what exactly do you do for your job at Sellafield?

3:56Dr Tim Gregory:So I work in a lab and I measure the chemistry and the radioactivity of all sorts of interesting materials. I'm really lucky as a chemist that I kind of get to tap into all different areas of nuclear science. Sometimes it's the kinds of materials that we put into nuclear reactors or pull out of nuclear reactors. Sometimes it's nuclear medicines. Sometimes it's even material that will one day power spacecraft, perhaps on the surface of Moon and Mars. And sometimes it's environmental samples. And so I'm very lucky that I get to interact with all sorts of cool and interesting people as part of my job.

4:29Today in Focus Host:And I believe that you're out of the lab today because you've cut your finger. And that's a big no-no in a nuclear lab.

4:34Dr Tim Gregory:Yeah, you're not allowed in the nuclear lab when you have a cut in case you get radioactivity inside you. That's common across all nuclear labs in the world. And mine is no exception. So I'm having a rare working from home day, which I don't actually like that much. I much prefer being in the lab.

4:51Today in Focus Host:Well, Sellafield's loss is our gain. But obviously, given that your livelihood depends on nuclear, it's unsurprising that you would be pro-nuclear. And full disclosure, I grew up just down the coast from you in Morecambe, a.k.a. the Lancashire Riviera. And there are not one but two nuclear power stations there. Loads of people I know that I went to school with work there. I once won a science prize that was sponsored by the nuclear power stations.

5:16Dr Tim Gregory:Oh, brilliant.

5:17Today in Focus Host:But I feel like I've got enough distance from it to interrogate it with a critical eye. But for those who did not grow up near a nuclear power station, can you just give us a bit of background? When did the UK first get involved in nuclear power?

5:31Dr Tim Gregory:So it was back in the mid-50s. The UK was actually the first country in the world to have a commercial nuclear power station. And that power station is called Calder Hall. From any morning, thousands of people have been arriving to witness an historic event in the industrial life of Britain and indeed of the world.

5:49Today in Focus Host:Today, Her Majesty the Queen is coming to Calder Hall

5:53Dr Tim Gregory:to open Britain's first atomic power station. And it's actually at Sellafield. I see it pretty much every day. The building is still there. The history of nuclear power in the UK is, it kind of runs in parallel to the history of nuclear power in general in the West, in North America and Europe. There was nuclear new build starting in the 50s and the 60s, but it really got going in the 70s. There was lots of new nuclear during that decade. And unfortunately, it kind of all came to an end in North America after Three Mile Island in 1979. There was a partial nuclear meltdown of one of the reactors at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania.

6:32Today in Focus Host:It all began at 4 a.m., a combination of mechanical failures and human blunders. Vital cooling water was spewing out onto the floor, forcing the core to overheat.

6:42Dr Tim Gregory:Nobody died, nobody was hurt, and nobody was exposed to radiation beyond what you would ordinarily be exposed to every day going about your daily life from background radiation. But it really shook confidence in nuclear power amongst the public, in industry, amongst politicians in North America. And so it effectively ended the nuclear expansion on that side of the pond. And then, of course, in 1986, we had Chernobyl in Europe, and that effectively did the same thing for Europe's nuclear power expansion. It ended it. It does now seem likely that sometime in the last couple of days there's been perhaps the worst accident in the short history of the world's nuclear power industry.

7:22Dr Tim Gregory:The Russians may have been hoping they could contain it without having to release the news as they appear to have tried to do so in an earlier accident in the Urals 19 years ago. But the fact that they've had to reveal it and admit that there are casualties suggest they're deeply worried about the scale of it. Again, we built more nuclear reactors in Europe in the five years leading up to Chernobyl than we have built since. And so it's really no stretch to say that it was Three Mile Island and Chernobyl that put an end to the expansion of nuclear power in the West.

7:52Today in Focus Host:And so I think in the UK we haven't actually built a nuclear power station since the 1990s, so we're relying on ever more ageing reactors. But currently, in terms of the energy mix in the UK, How much power does the UK generate from nuclear compared with other sources?

8:08Dr Tim Gregory:So we get about 15 % of our electricity from nuclear power at the moment. That's down from a high of about 25 % in the mid-90s. And you're absolutely right. We haven't connected a nuclear reactor to the grid since the late 90s, and that was size well B. And so that 15 % nuclear that currently makes up the nuclear generation in the UK is a legacy of our old nuclear power stations. and they are going to be shut down in the next five, ten years, something like that. They keep having their lifetimes extended, which is encouraging that there's no point switching a nuclear reactor off that's perfectly functioning.

8:46Dr Tim Gregory:But they will be retired probably in the next five to ten years, which will put a massive dint in the UK's nuclear power generation capacity.

9:01Today in Focus Host:So, Tim, Christmas must have come early for you last month when the government committed a lot of money to nuclear.

9:07Dr Tim Gregory:I can announce today to you that this Labour government is investing in the biggest rollout of nuclear power in a generation.

9:15Today in Focus Host:So the government has recommitted to building Sizewell C on the Suffolk coast and they've ploughed yet more money into finishing Hinkley Point C, which will be the first new nuclear power station to be built in the UK since the 1990s. And these should supposedly be finished sometime in the next decade. What did you think when the plans were announced?

9:36Dr Tim Gregory:I was delighted. You know, the thing about net zero is that no one has achieved net zero yet. Basically, every country in the world is a really, really long way from net zero. We're nowhere near net zero. And we in the UK, we've only been trying to do it for the last five or six years, something like that. And so it's no surprise that this embracing of nuclear power as a means to net zero has taken a little bit of time to get going. but the fact that it's finally happening with the announcement of Sizewell C is enormously encouraging because I'm certainly of the mind that net zero is impossible without nuclear power.

10:11Dr Tim Gregory:We pretty much face a choice between net zero with nuclear reactors or net zero never. Renewables are great at getting you started and they definitely definitely have their part in the future of the UK's energy mix but they're not enough on their own. We need that nuclear power as well.

10:26Today in Focus Host:And you don't see it as a kind of transition technology to get us on the road to being a fully renewable energy economy? You think it's something that we should have in the mix forever?

10:37Dr Tim Gregory:Definitely in the short and medium term. I don't think that we will ever be 100 % renewable powered because of the intermittence of renewables. I mean, it sounds so obvious saying it that it's almost become a cliche, but wind turbines don't work when it's not windy. And solar panels don't work very well in winter and they don't work at all at night time. And so the question is, how do you plug those gaps when renewables are not generating power? And people often tout solutions like batteries and hydroelectric dams. But unfortunately, the amount of storage for electricity that you get from those technologies are measured in minutes, maybe hours, whereas the weather and the sun can falter for days and weeks at a time.

11:20Dr Tim Gregory:And so you need something reliable to support the intermittence of renewables. And nuclear power is a really obvious solution to that problem because it's carbon free. It does not emit carbon dioxide.

11:30Today in Focus Host:No, but there are other issues with nuclear that we will come on to. But can you just explain how efficient a nuclear power station is compared with renewable energy generation?

11:40Dr Tim Gregory:Yeah, for sure. So a single nuclear reactor can produce electricity for about a million people. It's something like that. And when SizeWellC comes online, it will generate, it's something like 10 % of the UK's electricity, which is just, it's an astronomical number. It's not just like a couple of percent here and there. We're talking about like 10 % of the UK's power from a single power station. And so they're incredibly efficient. They're incredibly energy dense as well. You don't need to take up much room to generate an enormous amount of power with a nuclear reactor, unlike wind turbines and solar panels, where you need to consume actually quite an enormous amount of land, not just to install the infrastructure, say in the UK, but also to mine the minerals from which those solar panels of wind turbines are made.

12:27Dr Tim Gregory:You need to exhume enormous amounts of land to mine the critical minerals.

12:31Today in Focus Host:But they've also got a newfound enthusiasm for these mini reactors. Tell me about them. How do they work?

12:37Dr Tim Gregory:So they're really exciting. And miniature nuclear reactors are actually not new. Back in the 50s, a lot of the early prototype nuclear reactors would easily fit under your kitchen table. They were actually quite small. And for many, many decades, we've been powering submarines with nuclear reactors as well. And as you can imagine, to fit a nuclear reactor aboard a submarine, it's got to be quite small. And so these small reactors are not new, but what is new is deploying them for pumping electricity into the grid. And that's where these small modular reactors are kind of generating a lot of excitement.

13:11Dr Tim Gregory:And the idea is that you can fabricate upwards of 80, 85 % of the nuclear reactor on a factory line. You can essentially mass produce them just as you might mass produce IKEA furniture. And just as you might transport IKEA furniture to your house in the back of your car, you can transport these pieces to where you want the nuclear reactor and click them together without all the fuss of building a giant gigawatt style power station like Hinkley Point C or Sizewell C. And so it's not just good for the timescales of deployment, you know, we're talking about maybe two or three years to build one of these small modular reactors.

13:46Dr Tim Gregory:It also means that you can fit them where no traditional nuclear power station could possibly fit, perhaps close to industrial centres, next to steelworks, next to AI data centres, tech hubs, biotech hubs, all that kind of thing. And so it's kind of reimagining nuclear power for the 21st century.

14:04Today in Focus Host:I mean, you make it sound so easy. It's a bit like there's episodes of Grand Designs, you know, when people order those houses that come on the back of a truck from Scandinavia, and then suddenly within a week, they're up. But, you know, there's no, as far as I know, there's no country in the world that uses these small modular reactors and has them working any kind of commercial level. You might be able to have them on nuclear submarines, as you've mentioned, but aren't they very unproven at a commercial level?