Greenpeace opposes nuclear energy. Young climate activists say that's 'old-fashioned' 

Young climate activists in Europe are calling on Greenpeace to drop its "old-fashioned" stance against nuclear energy.

Activists from five EU countries have launched the Dear Greenpeace campaign, asking the well-established environmental organization to get on board with what they see as a necessary tool in the fight against climate change. 

"It's a message of desperation from my generation to theirs," Ia Aanstoot, an 18-year-old Swedish climate activist, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

"We are really, really desperate to have them in the struggle against fossil fuels. And it feels like a betrayal for them to be going up against nuclear power."

Greenpeace and other critics of nuclear power, meanwhile, say it continues to be too dangerous, polluting, and cost-prohibitive to be a viable solution to the climate crisis. 

EU 'greenwashing' lawsuit 

The Dear Greenpeace campaign is financed by the Belgium-based environmental non-profit Replanet, which says it does not accept financing from political parties or industries. 

At the heart of the debate is whether nuclear energy should be part of the European Union's classification system for sustainable finance — a guide for private investors looking to fund green projects.

Greenpeace and several other non-profits are suing the EU Commission over nuclear's inclusion in that system, calling it "greenwashing."

"They were born from the anti-nuclear movement," Aanstoot said of Greenpeace. 

For several years, Aanstoot participated in climate activist Greta Thunberg's Friday school strikes. Now she has applied to the EU Court of Justice to become an "interested party" in Greenpeace's lawsuit, so she can make her case for nuclear development.

"The EU's decisions on what is green should be based on science and being carbon neutral, and it should not be technology-biased," she said.

Greenpeace says investment money would be better spent on safer and cheaper renewable energy sources like wind and solar. 

"We have the greatest respect for folks who are worried about the climate crisis and want to throw everything we have at the problem, but building new nuclear plants just isn't a viable solution. The top priority is to cut carbon emissions as fast and, ideally, as cheaply as possible, and nuclear fails on both scores," Ariadna Rodrigo, Greenpeace's EU sustainable finance campaigner, told CBC in an email. 

She pointed to nuclear plant projects in the U.K. and France that are "behind schedule and billions over budget."

"The good news is that we don't need new nuclear. Solar and wind technologies are a much cheaper and quicker way to cut emissions, and with modern storage tech, 100-per-cent renewable systems are perfectly possible," Rodrigo said.

"We don't have the luxury of endless time and resources, so we should focus them on the solutions with the best chance of delivering."

Risk versus reward

Daniel Kammen — a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies nuclear engineering — says he's not surprised by this seeming generational divide.

"Youth who are convinced — accurately so, in my opinion — that the older generation do not appreciate the climate crisis … are saying if we're going to fight for the climate, we have to use all tools at our disposal," he told CBC.

He says the biggest nuclear disasters throughout history — Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island — are, at best, distant memories for younger activists. 

But despite what nuclear proponents say, Kammen says risk of another such disaster "is real and it's big."

"It's reasonable to be optimistic, but the deeper you look, the more sceptical one should be of every nuclear option."

M.V. Ramana — a University of British Columbia professor of disarmament, global and human security — says "the probability of these accidents is small — but it is not zero."

"Which means that as you build more and more reactors, there's a higher likelihood of more such accidents happening," he told CBC.

Waste and weapons

Ramana says nuclear energy is neither a desirable nor a viable solution to climate change. 

"All nuclear plants necessarily produce radioactive waste. That's just part and parcel of the process of producing energy from a nuclear reactor, and there is nothing you can do to escape that," he said.

"We have, so far, not found any demonstrated, proven way of dealing with [this] waste safely anywhere in the world."

What's more, he says it's impossible to fully divorce nuclear energy from the possibility of nuclear arms development. The more countries that launch nuclear programs, he says, the greater the risk of nuclear weaponization.

But for Aanstoot, the cost-benefit analysis is clear.

"The climate crisis is such a greater risk to take that I feel like I'm a lot happier ladening my generation and the coming generations with the burden of managing a well-regulated, well-maintained and well-researched nuclear waste than I am with us having to deal with runaway greenhouse effects and massive climate disasters," she said.

Cost and time

But perhaps the biggest impediment to nuclear power, Ramana and Kammen say, is cost and time. 

There's a reason nuclear plants have a tendency to run over time and over budget. Nuclear power is a complex process that requires massive infrastructure, specific expertise, and much-needed safeguards. 

And as nuclear power gets more expensive, Kammen says wind and solar have only gotten cheaper and better.

"Every dollar you spend on nuclear power or building a nuclear reactor is a dollar that you're not spending on some other more feasible climate solutions," he said. 

Aanstoot and her colleagues argue that solar and wind power alone can't generate enough power to meet the demands of an electrified future. 

"We're going to need electric transport, an electrified industry and everything. We need a lot of stable electricity, and wind and solar will not cut it," she said. "And that means nuclear."

Kammen says the idea that renewable sources like solar and wind can't meet demand is "nuclear propaganda."

"Whether you do big grids with renewables, or small grids, it's reliable, it's scalable, it's cheaper," he said. 

Looking to the future

There are two types of nuclear power that do have potential, says Kammen. 

One is the use of modular nuclear reactors. Smaller an cheaper than traditional reactors, they're seen as a stopgap measure during a broader transition to wind and solar power. There are several in the works in Canada, but experts remain divided about their benefits. 

The other, Kammen says, is nuclear fusion.

Currently nuclear reactors generate energy by separating heavy atoms in a process called fission. Fusion, by contrast, forces atoms together. Unlike fission, it doesn't create radioactive byproducts, has no risk of nuclear meltdown and cannot be used to make nuclear weapons.

But it's also a process scientists are just beginning to unravel, and experts say we're decades away — at best — from putting it to practical use.

"There is absolutely no chance that anybody alive today is going to see commercial nuclear fusion energy," Ramana said.

"So it's not going to be, I think, something which we should even think about in terms of dealing with climate change. The climate problem is here and now — not in 50 years or 60 years."