The fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine three years ago has had many faces. For economists, the focus has mainly been on inflation. For geopolitical strategists, the attack represented a paradigm shift in Europe’s military doctrine and triggered a shift towards rearmament. In sustainable finance, the issue has highlighted the continent’s unhealthy energy dependence on natural gas from an unreliable partner and raised the issue of energy independence to the top of the bloc’s political agenda. There, geopolitical concerns clashed with the green agenda and the powerful views of the continent’s green parties, many of which emerged out of the 1960s anti-nuclear (weapons and energy) movements.
Carefully Re-embracing Nuclear Power for the Sake of the Transition
In a slow shift away from its rejection of nuclear power in the aftermath of the Fukushima accident, Germany recently put what seems to have been the final stop in completing Europe’s shift towards embracing nuclear power as part of its sustainable energy mix and taking charge of its energetic future. In this transition, Germany was helped not only by the internal discredit of its Green Party but also by pressures from EU institutions and other member states. The shift has been so marked, Germany has now joined other members of the board of the World Bank in allowing investments in nuclear projects for the first time since 2017.
Admittedly, I am not a dreamy-eyed endorser of nuclear energy. I have had the opportunity to skim over the many issues involved in nuclear power and came out of the process fully convinced of only one thing. It is not a simple and easy topic that one can carelessly endorse or reject. The safety issues alone are daunting enough, not to mention concerns about nuclear proliferation and radioactive waste management. However, if one is looking for a solution to renewable energy’s intermittency problems, the appeal of nuclear energy is undeniable.
I believe that these concerns should temper the rising endorsement for nuclear. We should embrace it as part of a green energy mix, but we should not let this newfound enthusiasm lead us to dismiss or ignore the cost associated with introducing nuclear into the green agenda. Accidents related to solar panel installations or wind power stations are tragic and may cause profound damage to families, communities and companies. Nuclear accidents, on the other hand, could represent a planetary threat. As we all embrace nuclear power, we must remember the lessons of the Three Mile Island accident (USA, 1979), Chernobyl (Ukraine – USSR, 1986) and Fukushima (Japan, 2011) and the Ukraine War. Power over nuclear power requires diligent and serious specialists, accountable institutions, well-tested processes and significant financial resources.
Could Intermittency Issues Trigger Nuclear Accidents?
The preceding warning may seem redundant and obvious. Nuclear concerns are clearly not new. But at a time of short news cycles, even shorter social media spat cycles, lower attention spans and political and corporate marketing hyperbole, the need for careful seriousness cannot be exaggerated. Such concerns are not merely the remit of nuclear power.
The recent Iberian blackout presents a timely example of these concerns. This week, the Spanish government published its preliminary report on the causes of the blackout that brought Portugal and Spain to a halt for twelve hours at the end of April. At face value, the preliminary conclusions suggest that the issue was with processes and rules that allowed miscalculations regarding the necessary adjustments for the grid to cope with surges in voltage. The report also pointed the finger at nuclear and gas-fired plants, which failed to fulfil their responsibility to rebalance the system. However, as an article by the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) notes, the likely occurrence of such voltage surges (or troughs) rises as the weight of renewable energy power plants increases in the grids energy mix,
As the IEEE Spectrum article notes, “there may have been sustained overvoltages, in which generating plants sent too high a voltage to the transmission grid just before the grid’s frequency dropped, which implies a potential issue: poorly distributed reactive power sources.Such sources can help control voltages when renewables send power from the distribution level of the grid up to the transmission level, which is becoming more common as grids add more distributed renewables.”
Portugal and Spain (rightly) boast about their commitment to the energy transition. But beyond the celebration of these commitments, the recommendations from the blackout investigations are clear. Energy authorities need to ensure that operational procedures are up-to-date, that electric grid’s demand response, storage capacity, technical regulations, and interconnections with neighbouring countries are adequate. A blackout might not be as tragic as a nuclear disaster, but it is still a significant disruption to people’s life, economic activity and potentially a security threat. The mix of renewables with nuclear creates dimensions we should be mindful of.
This might be my Cassandra moment or an annoying backseat driver comment, but I do hope that someone has considered whether the requirements to absorb and fill the oscillations created by renewable energy can, in extreme cases, threaten the safety of nuclear power plants. It would be a shame if renewable power were ever to be the root cause of another nuclear catastrophe.
Fear the Corporates?
Tech giants stand at the nexus of the energy transition, with one foot on solar and wind and the other on nuclear, as they try to satisfy the energy needs of the data centres behind the continuous growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Just this week, Amazon signed a new power purchase agreement with US energy company Talen to provide the tech giant with 1,920 megawatts of nuclear power until 2042. In May, Google announced it was expanding its nuclear energy plans by providing early-stage capital for another US energy actor Elementl Power. As World Nuclear News notes, this “is not Google’s first nuclear power deal – in October 2024 the company signed an agreement with Kairos Power to purchase power from its fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature small modular reactors, with a fleet of up to 500 MW of capacity by 2035.” In September 2024, Microsoft announced it had signed a 20-year deal to purchase power from the controversial Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania, due to reopen in 2028 after improvements.
Two important questions arise from these news. On the one hand, one should always be mindful of greenwashing and check whether tech companies are just talking the talk or actually walking it. This is not easy to ascertain. According to an MIT Technology Review article, “between 2024 and 2028, the share of US electricity going to data centres may triple, from its current 4.4% to 12%.” The same article notes that approximately 60% of the USA’s energy supply comes from fossil fuels, with another 20% coming from nuclear and the remaining 20% from a mix of renewable energies. It is impossible to reconstruct how tech companies’ energy mix is distributed. Meanwhile, Carbon Credits notes that 63% of tech companies’ U.S. clean energy capacity is solar, 21% is wind energy and 14.2% is nuclear energy,” as of 2025. However, these figures seem to focus only on tech companies’ clean energy (in the USA). The figures do not actually clarify what the total share of fossil fuels is. Energy is of course also fungible, which means that even if tech companies use up most of the country’s available renewable and nuclear energy, other companies will be left with the brown one. It doesn’t mean that the overall share of clean energy increases.
The other concern is about corporate accountability and tech companies’ newfound passion for small modular reactors (SMRs). This is not a new concern of mine. As I mentioned, I’m not too fond of tech bros feeling like they can also be nuclear bros…
We Need to be Serious About Renewable and Nuclear Power
As the geopolitics fears take over political agendas we should be mindful of all the cool-aid coming our way and continue to demand robust energy policies, infrastructures, policies and accountability from enthusiastic politicians and corporate.
Failure to do so would undoubtedly undermine the public’s trust in the tools of the energy transition we so sorely need if we are going to meet the sustainability and geopolitical challenges of the coming 50 years.
