Europe's climate targets hang in the balance as the continent's nuclear fleet ages and new projects stall. Historian Marco Visscher argues in his latest book that the technology did not arrive too late to curb emissions but too early for a society ill-equipped to handle its promise and its perils.
The fading share of nuclear electricity
Global nuclear generation peaked at 17 per cent of the electricity mix in 1997. Today it sits below 10 per cent. Since 2000 more reactors have closed than opened. In Finland and France two flagship projects each took 17 years to complete and ran far over budget. The dominant narrative now casts nuclear power as an outdated option that the world can ill afford to wait for.
Yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lists nuclear energy among its technology solutions. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe argues that climate targets cannot be met without scaling it up. Politicians aligned with environmental or socialist platforms have spent decades restricting, regulating and reducing nuclear development. Campaign groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have opposed it for generations.
Origins in a world of energy scarcity
When atomic power emerged in the 1950s Europe's best coal mines were largely exhausted and nearly every viable hydroelectric site had been dammed. The discovery of vast oil fields in Saudi Arabia offered a new fuel but the 1956 Suez Crisis exposed the fragility of supply lines. At the same time scientists were beginning to warn that fossil fuels could warm the planet. In 1956 a newspaper article stated plainly that burning fossil fuels "may have very unpleasant consequences for the global climate in about 50 years' time." Two years later Charles David Keeling began measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide on a Hawaiian volcano, confirming the link between rising concentrations and rising temperatures.
Nuclear reactors promised a way to slash dependence on coal, oil and gas. Uranium was abundant. Even before carbon emissions entered public debate nuclear plants solved the more immediate problem of smoke and smog.
The promise of energy too cheap to meter
Post-war reconstruction brought rapid economic growth. Automation raised factory productivity. Fertilisers and synthetic pesticides boosted farm yields. Wages rose and unemployment fell. Nuclear power became the emblem of this leap into modernity. Lewis Strauss, a leading figure in the American nuclear establishment, declared in a famous speech:
"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly… and will experience a life span longer than ours."
Desalination, fertiliser production, even nuclear-powered transport all seemed within reach.
The shadow of the bomb
The same technology that powered reactors also produced the world's deadliest weapons. The Manhattan Project had turned fission into the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By 1949 the Soviet Union had tested its own device. The Cold War arms race accelerated. When Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953 he feared society was being paralysed by the threat of total annihilation. In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly he proposed taking nuclear technology out of military hands and dedicating it to peaceful uses in medicine, agriculture and energy. "The miraculous inventiveness of man," he said, "shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life."
The "Atoms for Peace" initiative sparked a wave of international reactor contracts. The 1960s became nuclear power's heyday. Plants were relatively cheap, kept getting larger and no energy source had ever captured market share so quickly.
Public fear and the weapons link
Critics dismissed the utopian dreams as hubris. The connection between civil reactors and weapons programmes was impossible to ignore. In the United States the Atomic Energy Commission oversaw both. The physics was the same and many of the people were the same. By the time Eisenhower left office the global nuclear stockpile had jumped from just over 800 warheads to nearly 20,000.
A simple logic took hold: more nuclear power meant more nuclear weapons. Anti-nuclear protests grew. Historian Spencer Weart later argued that public attention shifted from weapons to plants. Questions about radiation, accidents and waste turned into a movement to ban nuclear power altogether.
From magic to menace
Early in the 20th century radiation was seen as a health tonic. Radium appeared in soaps, chocolates and toothpaste. Doctors prescribed it for almost every ailment. But overexposure caused weakness, cataracts, hair loss and cancer. The atomic bomb brought these buried fears to life. Above-ground tests were eventually halted but the anxiety never fully disappeared.
Nuclear power became a symbol of needless complexity, enclosed by fences and warning signs. Critics insisted there must be an easier way to generate energy than splitting unstable atoms.
The modern stalemate
Today supporters point out that accidents are so rare nuclear power is as safe as solar and wind. They note that all high-level waste produced since the 1950s would fit into a single football stadium. The International Atomic Energy Agency monitors the weapons boundary and received a Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts. The global warhead count has fallen from a peak of 70,000 in the 1980s to roughly 12,000 today.
Critics counter that leaders such as Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un need only one bomb. They argue that burying waste deep underground does not make it safe. A blizzard of regulations, combined with governments that cancel projects mid-stream or shut reactors early, has made new plants exorbitantly expensive and painfully slow.
Since the mid-1980s the combined share of zero-carbon energy in the global electricity mix has risen only marginally while the fossil share has grown slightly. As power demand rises, producing enough clean electricity becomes a formidable challenge.
Innovation or proven technology?
Some proponents call for smaller reactors, thorium fuel, waste recycling or fusion. They hope new designs will be cheaper, faster and easier to build. Last week the US military airlifted a compact reactor across three states in a showcase of Donald Trump's ambition to modernise the industry. Yet none of these innovations has been proven at scale. Chasing them risks discarding a technology that works for experiments that will take decades to deliver.
Others argue for sticking with existing large light-water reactors. But those thrived mainly under central planning and state-owned utilities. Scaling them up today would require a retreat from liberalised energy markets, a systemic change that looks unlikely.
A missed opportunity
Frederick Soddy, who with Ernest Rutherford demonstrated the transmutation of atoms in 1900, fervently hoped that control of atomic energy would be postponed until society was mature enough to take responsibility for it, yet not postponed indefinitely lest an energy crisis become inevitable. The question remains: when is society ever mature enough?
Our failure to act swiftly has locked in decades of additional emissions and narrowed the options available. Future generations may well look back on this period as a profound missed opportunity. Halting global warming will not happen any faster if we keep insisting that nuclear power comes too late. The deeper truth, Visscher suggests, is that it simply came too early.