Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Oxford, on why society as a whole – not just shipping – must embrace nuclear power.
National prosperity depends on what we do – that is on our productivity. A call to raise this may seem coercive – a suggestion that everybody should work harder. But as the population ages and the birthrate declines, this seems unlikely. There must be another way.
In the past a major uplift in productivity has occurred whenever a new source of energy has been engaged. Energy is a scientific synonym for effort and so productivity rises as a new mechanism relieves us of extra work. What can we learn from how this happened in the past? Does this provide an answer today? If so, why hasn’t it been tried already?
A million years ago in the Promethean revolution the world accepted fire into the home. The public education and safety discipline required must have triggered major social change. Whatever the disruption, its effect was far outweighed by the leap in productivity and the quality of life that followed. The supremacy of humans over other creatures was firmly established and, although its dangers persisted, human prosperity never looked back. We may surmise that communication and education were key. Distrust and secrecy were unhelpful. All children were brought up to respect fire safety, as they are today.
Then 250 years ago in the Industrial Revolution, the combustion of fossil fuels enabled engines to do the work of humans. The increase in growth was phenomenal. The ability to provide energy at the required time and place was crucial. In the 19th century natural science called this energy source “chemistry”, and later it gave birth also to electronics, with a further saving of effort and increase in productivity.
However, not until 1924 was a universal one-line explanation provided by the wave mechanism of quantum physics. Matter is composed of atoms, each containing electrons and a nucleus. The quantum calculated behaviour of atomic electrons accounts for chemistry and electronics precisely. The very same calculation applied to the nucleus of an atom gives a value of energy a million times greater.
In 1931 Winston Churchill wrote an article comparing the productivity of human effort, fossil fuel and nuclear energy.
“The coal a man can get in a day can easily do 500 times as much work as the man himself. Nuclear energy is at least one million times more powerful still. The discovery and control of such sources of power would cause changes in human affairs incomparably greater than those produced by the steam-engine four generations ago.”
He was quite right, although nobody knew then how to unlock this energy, a problem that was solved in 1938. Nuclear power stations were built successfully from the 1950s onwards, but the energy was treated with extreme caution and its deployment largely suppressed in a dark age that lasted for another 70 years. Meanwhile, the burning of fossil fuels continued despite the effect on the natural environment. Only in 2015 was it agreed that this should cease. And in September 2024, when the inadequacies of intermittent renewables to provide for an expanding economy became clear, 14 major banks and foundations met at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and agreed that a tripling of nuclear investment should be funded. So, at last, the transformation that Churchill foresaw nearly a century ago can begin in earnest.
The energy needed to power artificial intelligence and data centres will be greater than previously supposed. The human productivity gap will grow as the shrinking working population needs to spend more time raising and educating children while also caring for the elderly. Reliable energy sources able to withstand extreme meteorological conditions will be needed to provide energy on demand anywhere, unlike vulnerable and intermittent renewables.
In the cultural dark age of the past 70 years during which nuclear energy and its radiation were demonised and schools taught nothing about its benefits as an integral part of the natural world. Society accepted fear and ignorance in the name of precaution and safety! Few realised that nuclear energy is safer than fire, despite the factor of a million. That is indeed surprising. How could it be?
The primary release of nuclear energy by neutron-induced fission is easily controlled – the unstable neutrons are simply absorbed and the energy release halted. The secondary process, the radiation from the decay of the embers of fission, has only 1% of the energy but is uncontrollable – it has to be absorbed and mopped up. But, unlike an infection or a flame of fire, radiation is not contagious. Indeed, at low and moderate exposures radiation is essentially harmless and even beneficial, as experienced by those who received it for their health. In fact, biological cells have evolved nearly complete protection against radiation because it has always been present in the natural environment – if they hadn’t, we should not be here.
When guns and gunpowder replaced bows and arrows, the increased energy spooked the threat and reality of warfare. That was true of nuclear weapons, too. Indeed, the blast and fire released by a few kgs. of pure nuclear fuel is comparable to that of a few thousand tonnes of TNT – that is the factor of 1m again. That is what destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. However, data on the health of survivors confirm that the secondary radiation caused less than 0.5% of additional deaths. Still, the ghoulish story that has prevailed ever since has emphasised radiation with its supposed delayed and widespread effects. For many decades now, Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been thriving cities. The ‘disaster’ of Fukushima caused no casualties from radiation, but fear of it had serious worldwide economic, environmental and social consequences. Nonetheless, dread of a nuclear apocalypse continues to be used for political purposes, though unsupported by any scientific evidence. This is not to say that the effect of a nuclear explosion is not very destructive indeed, but it is local and short-term, and the radiation plays a relatively small part.
So, we should hasten the vast benefit that nuclear energy can bring to human prosperity. No doubt there will be setbacks, as there were in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Impending automation will cause unrest in a shrinking workforce. Immigration may provide effort to plug the productivity gap for a while, but birthrates are falling everywhere and in a few decades the benefit of this current political irritant will not be available. Then the effort provided by extra physical energy will be essential to support life as we know it, and that will have to come from nuclear energy. More humans will be needed to care for the elderly and to educate children about the natural world without precautionary redactions. Then to restore the birthrate, the cultural status of motherhood will be raised.
