Oppenheimer and nuclear energy: Is the world moving away from this power source?

By Samrat Sharma: With the release of Christopher Nolan’s biographical film “Oppenheimer”, the awesome power of nuclear energy is once again under the spotlight. Nuclear energy made several headlines back in the 1940s when the first atomic bomb was made by physicist J Robert Oppenheimer and a team of scientists as part of the Manhattan Project, and again in the 1950s, when the first nuclear power plant was commissioned. However, the invention that was once considered a game changer is gradually losing its charm now.

India’s nuclear power capacity rose from 300 MW in 1970 to 6,290 MW in 2023, according to the World Nuclear Association. However, its share in the country’s electricity mix has remained stagnant at a mere 2.5 per cent in the past four decades. And it is not just in India that nuclear energy has little role to play in the overall electricity mix. Aside from countries like France, the U.S., Japan, etc, the popularity of nuclear power has declined significantly across the world. Earlier this year, the German government closed down the country’s three remaining nuclear power plants.

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Solar is now overpowering nuclear

Nuclear energy had a great beginning in the early sixties, followed by the golden era for nuclear power around the 1970s, when maximum nuclear reactors were constructed and commissioned. Nuclear energy constituted a 15.1 per cent share of the global energy mix in 1985, but fell to 9.1 per cent in 2022. One of the major reasons for the downfall is the rise of renewable energy prospects, mostly solar energy.

“In 2021, the global solar capacity was 1.04 terawatts, while the global nuclear capacity was 463 gigawatts. This means that solar energy is already more than twice as abundant as nuclear energy,” Manish Purohit, a former scientist in the Solar Panel Division of the Indian Space Research Organisation, told India Today.

There are multiple reasons behind solar power replacing nuclear power, which include the falling cost of solar panels and units, higher speed of deployment, no threat of waste disposal and accidents, and increased government support, Purohit explained. Currently, there are over 90,000 metric tonnes of nuclear waste that require careful disposal globally.

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“One of the biggest factors behind the decline of global nuclear energy production is that old nuclear power plants are being retired and there has been no inclination to construct new ones for a long time. As the average life of a commercial nuclear reactor is around 60 years, most of the reactors are on the verge of retiring,” says Dr Nitendra Singh, the founder and president of the Indian Youth Nuclear Society.

The replenishment of nuclear power plants is quite slow due to several factors. Dr. Singh states that some of these are unsuitable current technology for rapid deployment, higher initial capital investment, and lack of international collaborations and policy constraints.

Fewer nuclear warheads

Nuclear energy first made its presence felt on the global stage with a blast, literally. And it let to decades of a nuclear arms race, becoming one of the central points of the Cold War between the U.S. and the erstwhile U.S.S.R. The total number of nuclear warheads rose to as high as 64,452 in 1986 but the number is now down to around 12,510. Most of these are owned by the U.S. and Russia. Apart from these two, nuclear weapons are owned by seven other nations: China, France, the U.K., Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. But as the world realised the extreme devastation that could be caused by nuclear bombs and that countries could obliterate each other completely, they began to focus on stopping the production of nuclear warheads.

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The biggest major step taken in this direction was the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which was adopted in June 12, 1968. The policy restricts the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology to further the goal of disarmament and to foster the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. With 191 signatories, the International Atomic Energy Agency calls it “the most widely adhered to treaty in the field of nuclear non-proliferation, peaceful uses of nuclear energy and nuclear disarmament”.