Challenging Times - The Renaissance of Renewable Energy - page 184

However, nuclear power plants cost a lot of money and take a long time to build, and,
therefore, they take a long time to recoup their initial costs. 12 Moreover, the costs of
nuclear waste disposal and plant decommissioning are difficult to calculate. When Britain
privatized its electricity industry in the 1980s, there were no takers for the nuclear power
plants (McNeill 2000 , 312). They remained in state hands until 2009, when they were
bought by the French state utility, Électricité de France. Uncertainty, both in terms of costs
andsafety,makesnuclearpoweraveryunattractive betforprivateinvestors,whogenerally
want to see a return on investment within ten years. As a result, governments often step in
with subsidies, financing, or loan guarantees.
If the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was almost enough to
bankrupt BP, 13 imagine the costs of cleaning up after a major nuclear accident. Major
nuclear accidents are rare (Sellafield, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are the
only ones to date), 14 but this risk is reflected in high insurance costs. The overall cleanup
and compensation costs of the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe have been estimated at more
than US$100 billion. As a result, the company was nationalised and the Japanese state
took over the costs of the accident (Greenpeace 2012, 2013 ). There is also the problem
of nuclear waste, which remains highly radioactive for tens of thousands of years. The
challenge of finding a place to store that waste safely for such an immense period of time
has so far proven overwhelming.
There was steady growth in the nuclear power sector from the mid-1970s to the
mid-1980s, roughly from the time of the first oil crisis in 1973 to the Chernobyl disaster
in 1986. After Chernobyl, the nuclear industry went into decline. Many reactors that had
been ordered or partly built were never completed, and some countries (notably Italy
and Sweden) opted to decommission their existing nuclear plants (Cooper 2009 ). Nuclear
power began to make a comeback in the first decade of this century, with thirty-nine new
plants connected to the grid between 2000 and 2010, most of them in Asia. Even in Europe,
the memory of Chernobyl appeared to have receded sufficiently for nuclear energy to be
reluctantly embraced as the quickest route to reach the carbon-reduction targets agreed
on at Kyoto. Had it not been for an earthquake off the coast of Japan, which triggered a
tsunami and led to the partial meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi plant in March 2011, we
would now probably be experiencing a renaissance of nuclear energy.