World on horns of dilemma with transition away from nuclear power

The instability of renewable energy supplies and prices are driving some countries — such as Japan, France, and the UK — to rethink movements away from nuclear power

Power plants in Seo District, Incheon, let off clouds, as seen from the Gyeongin Ara Waterway on Tuesday. (Yonhap News)

On Monday, the Japan National Press Club in the Uchisaiwai neighborhood of Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward hosted a roundtable of political party leaders ahead of the country’s upcoming House of Representatives election on Sunday. A key focus of the discussions was energy policy, as Japan wrestles with the dilemma of how to break away from both carbon and nuclear power at the same time.

Like South Korea, Japan plans to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. But after the nightmarish experience of the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, the Japanese public is strongly demanding a shift away from nuclear power.

The previous Democratic Party of Japan administration accepted these calls, finalizing a plan for achieving a shift away from nuclear power by the 2030s by gradually closing outdated plants without building new ones.

But when the Shinzo Abe administration took office, it unilaterally shut down discussions on transitioning away from nuclear power, finalizing its Basic Energy Plan in 2014 that involved maintaining the percentage of energy from nuclear power at 20–22%.

Kishida, who recently took office, avoided giving a direct answer when asked whether he planned to build new nuclear power plants. Instead, he merely reiterated his previous position in favor of restarting the nuclear power plants that have been taken offline.

“If you consider aspects such as stable electricity supplies and prices, we can’t respond through new and renewable energies alone. The first step we need to take is to resume nuclear power plant activity,” Kishida said at the roundtable.

This attempt to chase the two rabbits of a transition away from nuclear power and decarbonization is not simply something for Japan to wrestle with. As the global economy has been struggling to break out of the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been struck by an energy crisis that has left the countries of the world each trying to find their own answer to the same dilemma.

Globally, the prevailing attitude has been a realist perspective, one that sees the need for a certain level of nuclear power to serve baseload energy needs — accounting for a fixed portion of nuclear power no matter what the situation happens to be. At the same time, the transition away from nuclear power is also unavoidable, creating a deepening quandary for the countries of the world.

In this context, the actions of France and the UK have been drawing particular attention of late.

France — considered a major nuclear power — draws 70% of its total electricity from nuclear energy. In June 2014, it set plans to reduce its dependence on nuclear energy to 50% by 2025.

But after Emmanuel Macron took office as president, the country moved in November 2017 to postpone the target date to 2035. On Oct. 12 of this year, it went a step further by adding an investment of 1 billion euros (US$1.1 billion) in small-scale nuclear reactor development to its “France 2030,” an industry revitalization plan costing some 30 billion euros.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times published an article on Saturday predicting that nuclear energy would be central to the UK government’s strategy for achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. By 2035, most of the UK’s old nuclear power plants will have more or less reached the end of their lifespan, which means that new ones would have to be built to increase the supply of nuclear energy.

The main reason that the major economies have been taking these steps has to do with the instability of new and renewable energy supplies. Spain offers an excellent illustration.

As of 2019, Spain had reduced the proportion of coal use in its electricity production to 5%, compared with 36% in 2000. It had also drastically increased the proportions of renewable energy sources like solar and wind power, with another 21% coming from nuclear power.

But wind power generation has dropped by a full 20% since this summer due to a steep decline in wind levels. As a result, the wholesale price of electricity per megawatt-hour in Spain and Portugal reached as high as 230 euros on Friday — six times higher than a year before.

South Korea is similarly planning to chase the two rabbits of decarbonization and a transition away from nuclear power. This may seem extreme, but a closer look shows it to be a fairly moderate plan that involves not building any new nuclear power plants after the fifth and sixth Shin Kori reactors, with the nuclear transition taking the form of a gradual reduction in the proportion of electricity from nuclear power over a period of about six decades.

In a recent press interview, International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol shared the view that the percentage of electricity from nuclear power needs to be roughly tripled by 2050 to achieve the carbon neutrality target by that year. That approach would not conflict much with South Korea’s plan for a long-term transition away from nuclear power.

By Kim So-youn, Tokyo correspondent; Gil Yun-hyung, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]