How war in Ukraine and climate change are shaping the nuclear

Climate change and global security are pushing against each other in shaping the future. That’s particularly apparent in this week’s events surrounding nuclear power.

Nuclear power plants generate energy with no carbon dioxide emissions, providing an alternative to the fossil fuels that are warming the atmosphere.

“Coal and other fossil fuels are choking humanity,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said on Monday after the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its most recent report. “The present global energy mix is broken.”

In the same week, Russian military forces attacked the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine. One building in the nuclear power plant compound was set on fire.

“We are issuing a warning, no country has ever shot at nuclear blocks except for Russia,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video statement, according to a translation. “For the first time ever in our history, in the history of humankind, the terrorist country has reverted to nuclear terror.”

Later on Friday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that the nuclear power plant continued to be operated and there had been no release of radioactive material. Still, the security event sent shockwaves of fear throughout the globe.

“There is going to be a teeter totter about this,” said Kenneth Luongo, the founder of the nonprofit Partnership for Global Security, which works on security and energy policy.

Seeing Ukraine’s nuclear reactors come under attack is new, and especially alarming to “much of the population that equates nuclear with weapons and with danger, and with radioactivity and health concerns.”

At the same time, nations are coming to realize they can’t meet their climate goals with renewables, like wind and solar, alone. Luongo says there was a “sea change” in sentiment about nuclear at the COP 26 climate conference last year.

China and Russia have been the most dominant political powers in nuclear power.

There are about 440 nuclear power reactors operating in more than 30 countries that supply about 10% of the world’s electricity, according to the World Nuclear Association. Currently, 55 new reactors are being constructed in 19 countries, and 19 of those are in China. The U.S. only has two underway.

“Certainly, China has the most active program of new nuclear construction,” said John Kotek of the Nuclear Energy Institute.

China has “the fastest-growing commercial nuclear energy or civil nuclear energy sector in the world. They are building at a pace that is roughly equivalent to what you signed in the U.S. in the 70s, or France in the 70s and 80s,” Kotek said.

Some of China’s focus on building new nuclear energy reactors is a response to a rapid growth in demand for energy…