The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

Pennsylvania. The level of radioactivity leaked into the environment was too low to harm anyone, but the accident’s timing was uncanny. The real accident, although quickly contained, brought immediate attention to the film and it became a box-office smash.

Jack Lemmon won an Academy Award for his performance as the distraught plant manager who barricades himself inside the control room to prevent a criminal cover-up by the plant’s owners. I won’t spoil the ending, but the story remains gripping to this day. The China Syndrome horrified an audience of millions and, together with the accident at Three Mile Island, helped to turn the court of U.S. public opinion against nuclear energy. The last year that a construction permit for a new nuclear power plant was issued in the United States was 1979.¹³⁹

Then, a second, far more deadly catastrophe occurred. On April 26, 1986, nuclear reactor unit No. 4 exploded at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. The blast and consequent fire that burned for days released a radioactive cloud detected across much of Europe, with the fallout concentrated in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Two people were killed in the plant explosion, and twenty-eight emergency workers died from acute radiation poisoning. About five million people were exposed to some level of radiation.

Soviet officials initially downplayed the accident. It took eighteen days for then-general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to acknowledge the disaster on Soviet television, but he had already mobilized a massive response. Soviet helicopters dropped more than five thousand tons of sand, clay, lead, and other materials on the reactor’s burning core to smother the flames. Approximately 50,000 residents were evacuated from the nearby town of Pripyat, still abandoned today with many personal belongings lying where they were left. Some 116,000 people were relocated in 1986, followed by a further 220,000 in subsequent years. Approximately 350,000 emergency workers came to Chernobyl in 1986-87, and ultimately 600,000 were involved with the containment effort. Today, a thirty- kilometer “Exclusion Zone” surrounds the Chernobyl disaster site, and Ukraine’s government expends about 5% of its budget annually on costs related to its aftermath.¹⁴⁰ Although claims of tens or even hundreds of thousands of deaths are exaggerated—by conservative estimates perhaps 8,000 people suffered cancer as a result of Chernobyl¹⁴¹—and the failures leading to the explosion are unlikely to be repeated, it was an epic catastrophe from which the Soviet Union and nuclear industry never fully recovered. In the United States and many other countries, what lingering support for nuclear power had remained after Three Mile Island was largely buried alongside the victims of Chernobyl.

Today, that situation appears about to change. In late 2008, the U.S. company Northrop Grumman and the French company Areva, the world’s largest builder of nuclear reactors, announced a $360 million plan to build major components for seven proposed U.S. reactors. Twenty-one companies were seeking permission to build thirty-four new nuclear power plants across the United States, from New York to Texas. By 2009 the French firm EDF Group was planning to build eleven new reactors in Britain, the United States, China, and France, and contemplating several more in Italy and the United Arab Emirates. In 2010 U.S. president Barack Obama pledged more than $8.3 billion in conditional loans to build the first nuclear reactor on U.S. soil in over three decades, and for his 2011 budget sought to triple loan guarantees (to $54.5 billion) supporting six to nine more. In a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, U.S. secretary of energy Steven Chu called for building “small modular reactors,” less than one-third the size of previous nuclear plants, made in factories and transported to sites by truck or rail. And for the first time nearly two-thirds of Americans were in favor of nuclear power, the highest level of support since Gallup began polling on the issue in 1994.¹⁴²

One reason for all the renewed interest is that nuclear fission is one of only two forms of carbon-free energy already contributing a significant fraction of the world’s power supply.¹⁴³ Notwithstanding the threatening appearance of billowing white plumes streaming from concrete nuclear towers, they emit no greenhouse gases directly,¹⁴⁴ thus winning the support of a surprising number of climate-change activists. To date, nuclear reactors have been tapped mainly to produce electricity, but they also have potential uses for seawater desalinization, district heating, and making hydrogen fuel.¹⁴⁵ Nuclear power plants are very costly and take years to build, but once established they can provide electricity at prices comparable to burning fossil fuel. In some countries like Japan, nuclear power is actually cheaper than fossil-fuel power.¹⁴⁶ Nuclear advocates point to France, which gets about 80% of its electricity from nuclear plants with no accidents so far. Belgium, Sweden, and Japan also obtain large amounts of electricity from nuclear reactors, so far without major mishap.

Public health remains the single greatest concern with nuclear energy. Although great strides have been made to increase reactor safety,¹⁴⁷ accidents and terrorism remain legitimate threats. Of grave concern is the disposal of radioactive waste, which must be safely interred for tens of thousands of years. The most feasible way to do this is probably subterranean burial in a geologically secure formation. But certifying anything as “geologically secure” for a hundred thousand years is exceedingly difficult. After more than two decades of research and $8 billion spent, the U.S. government recently killed plans to tunnel a long-term nuclear waste repository into Yucca Mountain, a volcanic formation in Nevada. Even in the middle of desert, there was simply too much evidence of fluctuating water tables, earthquakes, and potential volcanic activity to declare the site “safe” for a hundred thousand years.

Finally, there is the issue of fuel supply. Estimated R/P life-index estimates for conventional uranium are under a hundred years, with most closer to fifty years. Therefore, over the long run a shift to nuclear power will require the reprocessing of spent uranium fuel rods from conventional “once-through” nuclear reactors so as to recycle usable fissile material. But spent-fuel reprocessing yields high-grade plutonium, even small amounts of which are the principal barrier to acquiring a nuclear bomb. Therefore, any expansion in nuclear power that involves spent-fuel reprocessing or breeder reactors elevates the threat of proliferating nuclear weapons and creates attractive targets for terrorism.

Nuclear power generates about 15% of the world’s electricity today. In a recent analysis of the industry’s future, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that if aggressive steps are taken to deal with the issues of waste disposal and security, it is feasible to more than triple the world’s current capacity to 1,000-1,500 conventional “once-through” nuclear reactors, up from the equivalent of 366 such reactors today.¹⁴⁸ Enough natural uranium is available to support this to at least midcentury or so. Depending on the choices we make,¹⁴⁹ our global nuclear power capacity is projected to either stagnate or grow fivefold, producing as little as 8% to as much as 38% of the world’s electricity by the year 2050.

Renewable Carbon-Free Electricity: The Holy Trinity

Besides nuclear fission, there are only three other carbon-free sources of energy positioned to significantly dent the world’s power needs by 2050.¹⁵⁰ Unlike nuclear energy (which consumes uranium), they are truly renewable. One of them, hydropower, is already important, generating about 16% of the world’s electricity today. The other two sources—wind and solar—provide barely 1% combined. But that breakdown is poised to change.

Hydropower is a mature technology that has already been developed to or near its maximum potential in much of the world. There are only so many large rivers, and even fewer appropriate places to build a dam. Except in Africa, South America, and parts of Asia, most of the good spots have already been taken. Big dams also create many local problems. They pool huge reservoirs, displacing farmland, wildlife, and people. They dramatically change hydrological conditions downstream—a big source of strife between countries sharing transboundary rivers—and fill up with silt, requiring dredging. While “small hydropower” schemes that don’t require dams, like waterwheels, have great potential for growth, big dam projects do not. For this reason, regardless of the choices we make,¹⁵¹ hydropower is expected to lose market share despite doubling in absolute terms. By 2050, it is projected to supply just 9%-14% of the world’s electricity.

Wind and solar, in contrast, are the fastest-growing energy sectors today. Although wind power provides barely 1% of the world’s electricity, that number hides enormous differences around the globe. Nearly 4% of electricity in the European Union, and nearly 20% in Denmark and the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island, comes from wind.¹⁵² This has partly to do with geography—the mid to high latitudes are windier than the tropics, for example—but much of it is driven by investment.

The wind power trend kicked off in the 1980s in California and in the 1990s in Denmark. Today, Germany,