When I was growing up, most of the animated movies had a clear delineation between good and evil, right and wrong. My dad said he knew I was growing up when I started realizing that life is more complicated than that. The Wizard may have had ulterior motives, and the Wicked Witch might just have been trying to save the monkeys. The world is full of grey areas, but what we do know is our environment requires care while we humans are out living our lives.
So, let’s discuss: is nuclear energy good for the environment? Science says yes.
The Earth is a set of complex and interdependent systems. Since 2009, scientists have estimated that the Earth has nine planetary boundaries with key metrics that, if crossed, may cause significant and possibly irreversible environmental changes. Climate change is only one of the nine interrelated boundaries. Basically, when it comes to thinking about what is “good” for the environment, it is important to think about electricity sources that don’t produce carbon, but there are other things to consider, too, like resource efficiency and how toxic outputs are.
Source: Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre
Now, I am a big sustainability nerd and an engineer at heart. Instead of getting into some heady, philosophical discussion about what it means to be “good,” I propose we use some good old-fashioned data to discuss the tradeoffs that we face in our clean energy transition, which can help visualize the good that nuclear energy generates.
Life cycle assessments are a powerful standardized tool used to quantify and weigh the environmental impacts of a product or service – from the resources and processes they use, to the waste they emit. Impact categories, much like planetary boundaries, include climate change, but also measure other effects like toxicity and land use.
In 2022, the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Europe published a report on a life cycle assessment on the global average environmental impact for the delivery of 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity to the grid in 2020. The report looks at all the environmental impacts from different energy sources across their lifetimes, including mining, construction, generation, and post-operations management, and compares them to the expected amount of electricity to be generated. Nuclear energy generates reliable, carbon-free electricity, but this analysis proves that it also has some of the lowest environmental and human health impacts per megawatt-hour when compared to other electricity sources – including wind and solar. And this is found consistently across different analyses, according to United Nations climate reports.
Source: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)
The bottom line is all electricity has costs, as with most human activity. We’re extracting energy from our surroundings, changing their form – of course there will be effects that need to be managed, no matter the source. At the end of the day, what makes sense for one community might not make sense for another. There’s lots of sun in Arizona, but less in Seattle; there’s lots of wind in Kansas, but if you’re in Atlanta in the dead of summer, I can assure you that you’d be praying for the slightest breeze.
However, the triple bottom line? Sustainable development has a lot of variables, and the math adds up: nuclear is doing, and will continue to do, a lot of good for the world’s people and environment. And there are a whole lot of communities that recognize that.
