June, 2024
Our June poll addressed what can be a bit of a hot-button issue in environmental circles – nuclear power and its role in an emissions-free energy future. The results were:
The largest portion of respondents answered that the role of nuclear was important, with the caveat that safety and waste disposal improvements were needed.
This cautious support for nuclear, together with the votes for the “Crucial – Nuclear energy is vital for achieving low-carbon energy goals” answer, tips the balance in favour of nuclear energy over the 50% mark.
After the answer providing conditional support, the next most popular answer was that nuclear power was unnecessary and that we should focus solely on renewables as the keystone of the transition away from fossil fuels.
Finally, the other answer provided, that the risks associated with nuclear are too high, along with “Other” answers that echoed the sentiment that the costs and risks associated with nuclear are too high, rounded out the rest of the responses.
While I think it is worth lumping the two answers in support together, and thus arriving at the conclusion that most respondents are in favour of nuclear power as a key part of the energy transition, I also think it’s worth teasing them apart a bit.
The conditional support, based on improvements to safety and storage, gets at some of the key concerns that people have regarding the role of nuclear power in our society. While the upsides are large – emissions-free power, large amounts of power, stable power… – the downside, in the event of a disaster, can be large, too.
Ask anyone about nuclear power, and they are likely to respond with the names of three disasters – Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. This is just as likely to be the case if they get all of their electricity from nuclear generation, as many of us do in Ontario.
This concern about nuclear, I think, is in part due to its association with nuclear weapons, as well as due to how our understanding of our world is shaped by media narratives and the type of information it conveys. There is far more attention paid to things when they go wrong, than there is to things when they just work, and so the bad occurrences and their impacts can often take on an outsized role in our decision-making.
Nuclear power is, in fact, among the safest forms of energy that we currently have, at least according to data on deaths due to accidents and air pollution.
For those answering in the negative, I wonder what the answers would be if we made the choice a little more difficult? If, for instance, it were something along the lines of, “If you had to choose between nuclear and natural gas power generation, which would you prefer?” or, “If you had to choose between an energy economy heavily reliant on China, such as is likely with a greater reliance on solar panels, and the development of a domestic nuclear industry, which would you prefer?” (China controls around 95% of the global production capacity of components for solar panels.)
Or course renewables aren’t only solar, but I think it’s worth complicating the issue of nuclear a bit more than what our initial questions allowed. It is an issue that is laden with a large amount of fear and misunderstanding, and given the magnitude of the climate crisis and the task of transitioning away from fossil fuel energy, we need to be open to what might be some difficult trade-offs.
