A decade after triple meltdowns at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant brought the nuclear industry to a standstill, advocates are sensing a tailwind brought on by the urgency of climate change.

In the race to decarbonize, and mitigate disruptions brought on by climate change, many climate activists have reluctantly come to see nuclear energy as a necessity to a low-carbon future. That’s altering the risk calculus around nuclear power plants around the world.

“Slowly in the past two, three years we’ve started to see a much different dialogue and dynamic around nuclear throughout the world,” said George Borovas, head of the nuclear practice at law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth. “From governments to international organizations, and even some environmental organizations that were always anti-nuclear, lately they have become much more accepting because they see that climate change is our number one problem.”

‘Fukushima changed everything’

The Fukushima disaster in 2011 set off a wave of anti-nuclear sentiment globally, in the immediate aftermath. Critics pointed to the events as a wake up call that highlighted the inherent risks associated with its technology. Four months after the reactor meltdowns, the German government announced plans to phase out all 17 of the country’s reactors by 2022, while the Swiss abandoned plans to build new nuclear reactors and committed to phase out existing ones. In Japan, where nuclear power accounted for a third of the country’s energy mix before March 2011, just nine of its 54 existing reactors have been authorized to operate over the last decade.

The U.S. remains the world’s largest producer of nuclear power, with its 98 reactors accounting for 20% of America’s total electrical output, according to the Department of Energy.

“Fukushima changed everything because it was a real accident in a sophisticated, highly developed country that was known for its safety record…it was not Chernobyl, which had a completely different profile at the time,” Borovas said. “The whole industry retrenched. Countries around the world retrenched.”

A decade on, nuclear power capacity has increased by about 43 gigawatts, the equivalent of roughly 43 reactors coming online, according to a report by the International Energy Agency. Though the number of reactors have declined from more than 430 in 2011, to 414 globally, existing reactors have increased their output to meet demand.

The growth has been most pronounced in emerging economies, which see nuclear energy as the most sustainable path to meet the energy demands of a growing middle class, Borovas said. In China alone, where ongoing projects account for 20% of reactors under construction globally, the government has identified nuclear power as a key tool in its push to decarbonize. It recently called for the construction of coastal nuclear power plants to increase its energy capacity by 20 gigawatts in the next four years, the equivalent of 20 new reactors.

The path to net-zero emissions by 2050

In the U.S., where only one new nuclear plant has come online in 25 years, pro-nuclear groups have gotten a lift from unlikely allies. Those like the National Resources Defense Council and the Environment Defense Fund now see nuclear as a necessary tool to decarbonization. The Union of Concerned Scientists, an organization that has regularly warned of the dangers of nuclear, has highlighted the risks of prematurely phasing out existing nuclear reactors, only to be replaced primarily by natural gas and coal. A 2018 study by the group estimated the early closure of at-risk plants would increase the energy sector’s carbon emissions by 4% to 6% by 2035.

“This pathway would make it more difficult for the United States to achieve deep cuts in carbon emissions,” the report said.

But Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California at Berkeley, said renewable energy offers a better and safer alternative to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. Two-thirds of all new energy installations built worldwide last year were in solar and wind, he said. Renewables accounted for nearly 30% of global electricity generation as of April 2020, according to the IEA.

“Solar and wind are the cheapest forms of energy today. Nuclear can’t touch their prices. But when you say I want solar and wind plus storage, nuclear proponents say yeah we’ll meet that price and nuclear skeptics say well you’ve never met price targets in the past,” Kammen said. “Renewables are gobbling up the space that coal used to occupy.”

Future of nuclear energy

Concerns about safety and cost overruns continue to plague the industry. But a new generation of reactors, armed with advanced technologies and engineering, promise to address those concerns through small modular reactors or SMRs. Unlike traditional reactors, SMRs require a much smaller footprint and can be scaled up at a faster and cheaper cost because components can be mass produced in factories, according to Borovas. The new reactor designs also don’t require the amount of shielding and maintenance the existing ones do. The sheer potential of the technology has already attracted some big name investors, including Bill Gates and the U.S. government, into companies like TerraPower and NuScalet.

The only problem — no commercial SMR has been successfully launched anywhere in the world, Borovas said. The first modular reactor in the U.S., developed by NuScale, isn’t expected to be completed until the end of the decade.

“If you look at these small plants as technologically and fundamentally different than large plants, then there’s a huge potential building boom for nuclear,” Kammen said. “If you view these as just compounding the challenges of larger plants, but just having many more of them, then it doesn’t look like a road to somewhere because no one has proven yet that these small plants will be fundamentally different in cost and fundamentally safer.”