(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Some 36 years after the disaster at Chernobyl, no one wants to hear reports of safety issues around a nuclear power plant in Ukraine.
So it got attention when President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said early Friday that Russian shelling at the Zaporizhzhia station could be the “end of Europe” if were to lead to an explosion. (Russian forces later occupied the facility.) But that's not a likely scenario. As with almost all nuclear plants built since Chernobyl, Zaporizhzhia's reactors are housed inside containment buildings that will protect them from plane crashes, tornadoes, bomb attacks, and explosions caused by the escape of flammable fission by-products. Ukrainian regulators said a fire at the site hadn't affected essential equipment, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Decades of improvements to reactor designs have resulted in power plants where risks are far lower than in the case of the accidents at Chernobyl, Fukushima in 2011 or Three Mile Island in 1979, not to mention the rudimentary reactor that caused the 1957 Windscale fire in the U.K.
That doesn't mean a radioactive escape is impossible. Containment buildings are designed to protect against accidents and, in a pinch, terrorist attacks. Deliberate and well-targeted heavy military bombardment could breach those defenses — but we must hope that such a scenario isn't on the cards. As one of the world's biggest providers of atomic power engineering and fuel, Russia's self-interests would lean strongly against allowing such a disastrous outcome to occur.
All that shows why we should worry a little less about the risks from the world's nuclear plants. It's reason, too, to welcome the possibility that Europe might take the current crisis as an excuse to extend the life of atomic power stations that are set to be shut down in the coming years, giving a new lease of life to one form of zero-carbon power. Germany is considering such a move, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck said last week.
At the same time, the war shows why the bad old model of nuclear power — where electricity is produced by a small number of hulking, costly, gigawatt-scale power stations rather than a zippy fleet of flat-pack micro-generators — is also the best model for the future. Atomic energy can still play an important role as the world transitions away from fossil fuels. Big, however, is likely to continue to be beautiful.
The problems of conventional nuclear power are well illustrated by the state of two reactors at the Vogtle plant in the U.S. state of Georgia, which are still unfinished after more than a decade and $28.5 billion of capital spending. Wind and solar depend on manufactured products whose costs tend to fall with growing installation numbers, in the same way that computing power has surged since the 1960s under Moore's Law. That explains why they've grown so cheap in recent years, overtaking generation from atomic facilities in 2020. Nuclear depends on colossal construction projects, which show no such declining cost trend. The increase in safety requirements since about 1980 has undoubtedly been a major factor in the rising complexity and cost of the plants themselves.
One posited solution has been to ape the economics of renewables by turning reactors into a mass-produced device as well. So-called small modular reactors, or SMRs, could be churned out in large numbers and installed at the town scale, equipped with simpler, passive safety devices rather than the labyrinthine redundant systems standard on conventional nuclear plants. A U.S.-Romanian project hopes to have one such device connected as soon as 2027 and a demonstration plant went online in China last year. That's far too late to be scaling up a new technology, given how fast we need to be reducing power-sector emissions this decade. But it's a start.
Events at Zaporizhzhia, however, show why we're likely to stick with conventional nuclear. The biggest problem with SMRs has always been safety and proliferation. The economies of scale when dealing with those risks are immense, and lean heavily in the direction of using large power plants. If you think it's alarming keeping an eye on four nuclear power plants containing 15 reactors in an unstable war zone, consider how much more troubling it would be if there were, say, 50 of them. Then reflect on the fact that most SMR designs only reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation during fueling and waste disposal by having fuel enriched to levels close to those used in nuclear weapons.
The unique problem faced by nuclear power is that no other generation technology has the grim potential to depopulate an entire region for decades. There are still at least 36,000 evacuees from the Fukushima disaster scattered around Japan. The safety measures introduced to alleviate that risk aren't meaningless “safety theater,” but an essential plank of public acceptance for atomic energy.
Surmounting the cost challenges isn't straightforward — but the energy transition ought to make it easier. At the carbon prices of 98.49 euros ($110) per metric ton seen in Europe last month, even the sky-high cost of building new nuclear plants can compete with coal. Given the revolution happening within global energy markets right now, it's possible that they could even undercut gas in the future. Nuclear isn't dead yet — but it will need plenty more state support if it's to survive the coming decades.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities, as well as industrial and consumer companies. He has been a reporter for Bloomberg News, Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Guardian.
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