Is abandoning N-power Europe’s big mistake?

Until 2011, Paul Bossens was an entrepreneur quietly running a small IT business in Leuven, not far from the Belgian capital of Brussels. Aside from an interest in the environment — he’s an enthusiast for electric cars who delights in his shiny gull-wing Tesla Model X — Bossens, 68, wouldn’t have called himself politically committed. “I was never really one to be an activist or a protester,” he says. “I was too busy running my firm.”
Belgium had passed a law in 2003 ordaining nuclear’s phaseout by 2025, and the first reactor shutdowns were expected in 2015. People were just beginning to ponder the consequences: Belgium depends on its atomic reactors for almost half its electricity, and the first wave of closures alone would have shuttered nearly 15% of the country’s output.
“I thought nuclear power must be dangerous, so we needed to find another way to generate electricity and get on with replacing it,” recalls Bossens. “And he said: ‘No, nuclear power has hardly ever killed anyone.’”
Surprised by the answer, Bossens did his own research and found that his colleague was right. Despite all the stories about the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power is one of the safest ways to produce electricity, being responsible for just 0.07 deaths per terawatt-hour generated, while coal and oil are responsible for 24.6 and 18.4 deaths respectively. (Wind is responsible for 0.04.)
Bossens found himself increasingly warming to nuclear’s virtues. Not only is it reliable while producing zero carbon emissions, but it is also pretty practical in a small country such as Belgium, generating huge quantities of power from a relatively tiny footprint. The country’s two nuclear plants occupy less than 400 acres of land.
“I felt that if I had been given the wrong facts, others had been, too,” he says. So Bossens wrote a presentation based on his research and started touring the country speaking to whoever would have him — rotary clubs, schools. It wasn’t easy to get bookings at the beginning, he recalls, but he was encouraged by the receptiveness of his audiences. His aim, as he saw it, wasn’t simply to save Belgium’s threatened reactors. It also was to set the story straight on nuclear power.
Europe has long had mixed emotions about atomic energy. Not all European Union countries have it; only 13 of the bloc’s 27 members have reactors, while some, such as Austria, are long-standing opponents. There is a tradition of anti-nuclear activism: The first mass protests against reactor construction took place at Wyhl in Germany back in 1971. And some countries that once had reactors no longer do; Italy voted to scrap its entire fleet after the Chernobyl accident in the 1980s. Yet the drift towards the exit now goes beyond the skepticism in places like Belgium or Germany, which have set official policies for nuclear power’s phaseout. Elsewhere, much of the continent is steadily denuclearizing by default.
As recently as 2000, Europe generated almost a third of its electricity from nuclear fission, the highest proportion of any region. Since then, capacity has dwindled as plants have closed without being replaced. Meanwhile, Germany embarked on its radical plan to phase out its reactors early and replace them with renewables at a projected cost, by 2025, of around $580 billion. By last year, nuclear output from Europe’s 123 reactors had dropped to just 24% of electrical generation — a multi-decade low.
Further declines are likely, according to Foratom, the European nuclear industry association. It commissioned a report two years ago to look at nuclear’s likely contribution to achieving Europe’s net-zero goals by 2050. The most optimistic scenario, it concluded, was that nuclear might just about hold its present share of generation, which itself would grow sharply as transport and heating were electrified in the future. The other options were gloomier, with the low case suggesting nuclear’s share of electricity generation might fall to as low as 5%. Recent events are raising hard questions about the wisdom of this trajectory. The flip side of denuclearisation is greater reliance on “new” renewables (mostly wind and solar, excluding hydro), whose output is mainly variable, as well as carbon-emitting gas. These sources rose from 17% of total electricity production in 2000 to 40% in 2019.

—Bloomberg