OPINION | DAVID HESS


Adapting tactics for nuclear


The climate crisis has prompted a reappraisal of nuclear generation with its low- carbon credentials but to deliver on this promise means a robust approach to embracing resilience too. Nuclear has inherent capabilities to address growing climate risk – the industry needs to make sure that the message is getting through


David Hess, Senior VP DeepGeo


AST YEAR WAS THE HOTTEST one on record by an unexpectedly large margin. It is unclear what this means. Perhaps the result was a statistical outlier, the kind of fluctuation that it is to be expected when you track an apparently smooth trend over time. Then again, perhaps it was not.


Some people have postulated that this could reflect an acceleration in the planetary temperature rise. For example, YouTube physicist Sabine Hossenfelder


posted a video in March titled: “I wasn’t worried about climate change. Now I am”. This questioned whether leading climate scientists and institutions were wrong about the key sensitivity parameters, quoting research involving the eminent James Hansen. At last count the video had garnered over 1.6 million views. This defies a comforting narrative which had emerged


in the last couple of years suggesting that perhaps we had climate change under control. While confining temperatures beneath 2°C (and certainly 1.5°C) is broadly acknowledged as unrealistic – good for target setting but not on track for


being met – an influential group of experts had started to converge on a number somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5°C as the likely limit over pre-industrial times. Humanity, it seems, had turned a corner and the


controversial RCP 8.5 (Representative Concentration Pathways) scenarios found in the IPCC reports could no longer be justified. The impending doom of climate change became measurable and controllable. The fatalism frequently voiced by today’s youth became unfounded. In 2019, Breakthrough Institute director Ted Nordhaus


©Alexy Kovynev


came up with the analogy of climate change being diabetes for the planet. Yes, still a serious condition, but the remedy was not radical untested medicine. Rather it was the slow and steady planetary equivalent of changing diet, exercise, blood monitoring and regular insulin injections. In this case decarbonisation, electrification and a technology-inclusive, steady approach. Last year then was a wake-up call. A reminder that even given recent progress governments can’t afford to be complacent. The climate is unsurprisingly a complex system and what we don’t know can – and in all likelihood will – hurt us. So, they must continue to pick up the pace on mitigation efforts. Equally though, they must be more ready than ever to promote investment in the adaptation solutions needed for a climate-changed world. Among other things, investing in adaption means


investing in energy. Energy is the great enabler of modernity and all the comforts and security that brings. In some regions this means building up more energy supplies to meet growing need for air conditioning. In others it means creating a more resilient grid that can withstand an increased intensity (and possibly frequency) of severe storms and climate events. While the nuclear industry has essentially won the battle


for recognition of being a low carbon energy technology and necessary for net-zero at last year’s COP, it has arguably not won the battle of being recognised for its climate resilience attributes and being necessary for adaptation. This is fast becoming a new battleground. In fact, nuclear plants have been attacked as particularly


“This may be a bit extreme, but radiation is definitely far worse” 14 | May 2024 | www.neimagazine.com


vulnerable to climate change by the likes of Paul Dorfman, who claims that surging coastal swells and rising oceans could cause a nuclear accident. It has been suggested that wildfires could threaten plants, as could heavier flooding.


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