Something strange happened over the past four decades. The single most powerful, most proven, most scalable source of carbon-free electricity on Earth was slowly abandoned -- not because it failed, but because we got scared. Nuclear energy, which by the early 1990s supplied nearly 18 percent of global electricity, has been in managed decline ever since. Today it accounts for roughly 10 percent. And the consequences of that retreat are now impossible to ignore.
This is not a contrarian provocation. It is an accounting of what happened, what it cost us, and what the path forward looks like -- if we are honest enough to take it.
The Great Stall
The story of nuclear energy's decline is not primarily a story about technology. It is a story about politics, public perception, and institutional cowardice.
After the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979, the American nuclear industry entered a regulatory deep freeze from which it never fully recovered. Not a single new reactor was completed in the United States between 1996 and 2023. The accident released negligible radiation -- no one died, no one was injured in any measurable way -- but it ignited a cultural fear that proved far more durable than any isotope.
Chernobyl in 1986 compounded the damage on a global scale. The disaster was catastrophic and real: a poorly designed Soviet reactor operated recklessly, with no containment structure, producing an explosion that contaminated vast areas of Ukraine and Belarus. The death toll, while debated, is estimated by the WHO at approximately 4,000 long-term cancer fatalities. It was a genuine tragedy. But it was also a tragedy rooted in a specific political and engineering context -- the absence of safety culture in the late Soviet system -- that bore almost no resemblance to Western reactor design and operation.
None of that mattered to the public imagination. Chernobyl became the universal symbol of nuclear danger, and every reactor on Earth inherited its stigma. The fact that coal power plants kill approximately 800,000 people per year through air pollution -- a figure dwarfing every nuclear accident in history combined -- was and remains largely ignored.
Fukushima in 2011 delivered the final blow. An earthquake and tsunami of historic magnitude struck a 40-year-old reactor designed in the 1960s. The resulting meltdowns released radiation that, according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, caused zero confirmed radiation deaths. The evacuation itself, however, killed approximately 2,200 people -- mostly elderly residents forced to relocate in chaotic conditions.
The world's response was not to learn from these distinctions. It was to panic.
Germany's Self-Inflicted Wound
No country illustrates the cost of anti-nuclear panic more vividly than Germany. In the wake of Fukushima -- an event that occurred on a seismically active island 9,000 kilometers away -- Germany announced the Energiewende: a complete phase-out of nuclear power by 2022, later extended to April 2023.
The numbers tell a devastating story. In 2010, Germany's nuclear fleet generated approximately 140 TWh of electricity per year at a carbon intensity near zero. By 2023, that capacity was gone entirely. To compensate, Germany burned more lignite and natural gas. Its electricity sector carbon emissions, which had been falling, plateaued and in some years increased.
The financial cost was staggering. Germany spent over 500 billion euros on renewable energy subsidies between 2000 and 2025, yet its electricity remained among the most expensive and most carbon-intensive in Western Europe. Meanwhile, the country became critically dependent on Russian natural gas -- a dependency that exploded into a full-blown energy crisis after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The irony is almost unbearable. Germany shut down safe, zero-carbon nuclear plants and replaced them partly with Russian gas, then found itself rationing energy and reopening coal plants when that gas supply was disrupted. The Energiewende was supposed to be a model for the world. Instead, it became a cautionary tale about what happens when energy policy is driven by ideology rather than evidence.
German electricity prices in 2025 averaged approximately 35 euro cents per kilowatt-hour for households -- roughly triple the rate in nuclear-powered France.
France: The Road Not Taken
France provides the counter-narrative. Following the oil crises of the 1970s, France embarked on an aggressive nuclear construction program. By the 1990s, roughly 75 percent of French electricity came from nuclear reactors. The result was among the cheapest and cleanest electricity grids in Europe.
French electricity sector emissions have been consistently one-fifth to one-tenth those of Germany on a per-capita basis. French household electricity prices have historically been 40 to 60 percent lower than German prices. And France achieved this not through some exotic or unreplicable strategy, but through straightforward industrial policy: standardized reactor designs, a centralized utility (EDF), and political will.
France is not without its problems. Its aging reactor fleet requires significant reinvestment. EDF's financial struggles are real. The EPR reactor at Flamanville, originally budgeted at 3.3 billion euros, ballooned to over 13 billion before finally connecting to the grid in 2024. Construction delays and cost overruns are legitimate criticisms of nuclear projects.
But these are engineering and management problems, not existential ones. They are problems that can be solved with better project management, regulatory reform, and industrial learning curves. The fundamental proposition -- that nuclear fission can produce vast quantities of reliable, zero-carbon electricity -- has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt by France's half-century of operating experience.
The Renewables Illusion
Let me be direct about something that earns me no friends at environmental conferences: solar and wind alone cannot decarbonize the electricity grid. They are essential components of the solution, but they are not the solution.
The reason is intermittency. Solar produces nothing at night. Wind is variable and unpredictable. Both require either massive energy storage (which does not yet exist at grid scale at affordable prices) or firm backup power that can ramp up when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
In practice, that backup has overwhelmingly been natural gas. This is why Germany, despite having the largest installed renewable capacity in Europe, still has carbon-intensive electricity. The gas plants that fill the gaps when renewables underperform are burning fossil fuels. And they will continue to burn fossil fuels until either storage technology undergoes a revolutionary breakthrough or nuclear provides the firm baseload power that renewables cannot.
The International Energy Agency's 2025 Net Zero Roadmap is explicit on this point: achieving global net-zero emissions by 2050 requires a doubling of nuclear capacity. Not a phase-out. A doubling. The IEA -- not historically a nuclear advocacy organization -- concluded that there is no realistic pathway to climate stability that does not include a significant expansion of nuclear power.
This does not mean renewables are bad. Solar and wind costs have fallen spectacularly, and they should be deployed aggressively. But deploying them as a replacement for nuclear, rather than as a complement, is a strategic error of historic proportions.
The New Generation: SMRs and Beyond
The nuclear technology landscape has evolved dramatically since the gigawatt-scale plants of the 1970s. Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) represent the most commercially advanced new approach.
SMRs are factory-built, transportable reactors with capacities typically between 50 and 300 megawatts -- a fraction of traditional large reactors. Their smaller size means lower upfront capital costs, shorter construction timelines, and the ability to be deployed in locations where a full-scale plant would be impractical. NuScale Power received the first-ever SMR design certification from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2023. Rolls-Royce SMR in the UK aims to deliver its first unit by the early 2030s. Canada, Poland, and Romania have all committed to SMR deployment programs.
Beyond SMRs, more radical designs are in development. Molten salt reactors operate at atmospheric pressure, eliminating the risk of pressure-driven explosions. They can use thorium as fuel -- an element four times more abundant than uranium in the Earth's crust -- and produce waste with significantly shorter half-lives. TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, is building its Natrium demonstration plant in Wyoming, a sodium-cooled fast reactor designed to pair with thermal energy storage.
Then there is fusion, the perpetual thirty-years-away technology that may finally be approaching viability. Commonwealth Fusion Systems achieved a record-breaking high-temperature superconducting magnet in 2021 and aims to demonstrate net energy gain by the late 2020s. Even fusion skeptics acknowledge that private investment in the sector -- exceeding 6 billion dollars as of 2025 -- suggests serious commercial interest, not just academic curiosity.
None of these technologies are silver bullets. All face regulatory, economic, and engineering challenges. But collectively, they represent a nuclear renaissance that could fundamentally alter the energy landscape -- if governments have the courage to support them.
The Safety Record Nobody Talks About
Here is a statistic that should be central to every energy debate but almost never is: nuclear power has the lowest death rate per unit of energy produced of any major electricity source. Lower than solar. Lower than wind. Dramatically lower than any fossil fuel.
Our World in Data, drawing on peer-reviewed research, estimates that nuclear power causes 0.03 deaths per terawatt-hour. Coal causes 24.6. Natural gas causes 2.8. Even solar (0.05) and wind (0.04) cause slightly more deaths per TWh than nuclear, primarily from manufacturing and installation accidents.
The fear of nuclear energy is, by any empirical measure, vastly disproportionate to its actual risk. We accept without protest the ongoing, invisible slaughter caused by fossil fuel air pollution -- the equivalent of a Chernobyl every few hours -- while demanding the absolute elimination of a technology whose worst-case accidents have caused a fraction of the harm.
This is not rational risk assessment. It is phobia dressed up as prudence.
The Waste Question
Nuclear waste is the objection that refuses to die, so let me address it directly. Yes, high-level nuclear waste is dangerous and long-lived. Yes, it requires careful management. But the scale of the problem is routinely overstated.
All the high-level nuclear waste ever produced by the United States -- from over sixty years of reactor operation -- would fit on a single football field stacked less than ten meters high. Compare this to the billions of tons of CO2 dumped into the atmosphere annually by fossil fuels, or the millions of tons of toxic coal ash sitting in unlined ponds across the country, leaching heavy metals into groundwater.
Finland's Onkalo repository, the world's first permanent deep geological storage facility, began operations in 2024. The engineering solution exists. Sweden is building its own. France has the Cigeo project underway. The problem is not that we lack the technology to store nuclear waste safely. The problem is that political opposition has prevented the deployment of proven solutions.
Moreover, advanced reactor designs can dramatically reduce the waste problem. Fast reactors can consume existing stockpiles of spent fuel, extracting additional energy and reducing the volume and longevity of remaining waste. In a fully closed fuel cycle, the timeline for waste to decay to background radiation levels shrinks from hundreds of thousands of years to a few hundred.
What Must Change
Restarting the nuclear engine will require changes on multiple fronts.
Regulatory reform. The licensing process for new reactors in the United States and Europe is glacially slow and prohibitively expensive. The NRC licensing process can take a decade and cost hundreds of millions of dollars before a single watt is generated. Risk-informed regulation -- which assesses actual safety performance rather than theoretical worst cases -- must replace the current prescriptive approach.
Public financing and risk-sharing. Nuclear plants have high upfront capital costs but very low operating costs over lifetimes of 60 to 80 years. Government loan guarantees, contracts for difference, and inclusion in clean energy standards can de-risk private investment. The UK's Regulated Asset Base model for Hinkley Point C, while imperfect, demonstrates that creative financing structures can attract capital.
Honest public communication. The nuclear industry and its advocates must stop being defensive and start being direct. The safety record is extraordinary. The climate case is irrefutable. The waste problem is manageable. These truths must be communicated clearly, repeatedly, and without apology.
International cooperation. Nuclear technology transfer, shared regulatory frameworks, and multilateral fuel supply agreements can accelerate deployment in developing countries where energy demand is growing fastest. The IAEA's SCALE initiative and the COP28 declaration -- in which 22 nations pledged to triple nuclear capacity by 2050 -- are steps in the right direction.
The Price of Delay
Every year that passes without a significant expansion of nuclear power is a year in which fossil fuels fill the gap. The climate math is unforgiving. Global CO2 emissions reached 37.4 billion tonnes in 2025 -- a record. Atmospheric CO2 concentration exceeded 427 parts per million. The window for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is, by most scientific assessments, already closed.
We did not arrive at this point because we lacked a proven, scalable, zero-carbon energy source. We arrived here because we chose, for decades, to ignore it. The world quietly gave up on nuclear energy, and the atmosphere recorded every year of that abandonment in parts per million.
The question now is not whether nuclear energy is necessary. The IEA, the IPCC, and virtually every credible energy modeler in the world agree that it is. The question is whether we will overcome the political, psychological, and institutional barriers that have held it back for forty years.
History will judge us not by our fears but by our emissions. And on that measure, the anti-nuclear movement -- however well-intentioned -- has been one of the most consequential environmental mistakes of the modern era.
Amir Hosseini is a nuclear energy policy researcher and writer. He has advised governments and international organizations on energy transition strategy and has published extensively on the intersection of nuclear technology, climate policy, and public risk perception.