Famed director misses the fact that further spending on nuclear power wastes billions of dollars that should go to renewables

By John Dudley Miller

Nuclear Now, the latest documentary from controversial writer/director Oliver Stone, argues that an undetermined large number of new nuclear power plants must be built quickly to power the world with clean energy, or it will not be possible to halt global warming at 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2050. If we exceed that limit, devastating climate changes will strike, causing killing heat, monster hurricanes, record-setting droughts, and the displacement of millions of people.

Over the years, Stone has drawn criticism for allegedly misstating historical facts in his movies (“Platoon,” “JFK,” “Natural Born Killers”), creating conspiracies where detractors claim there really were none. Appropriately, this new film begins by claiming a conspiracy against nuclear power. It asserts that nuclear has always been criticized unfairly, particularly by the oil industry, which it alleges has long exaggerated the harm that radiation from nuclear power plants causes.

The evidence the documentary presents to support its anti-nuclear conspiracy claim is thin and mixed: It tells viewers that in 1969 the CEO of the Atlantic Richfield oil company donated $200,000 to start Friends of the Earth, which is an anti-nuclear environmental group. The documentary calls that anti-nuclear bias.

But on the other hand, the next year the same man helped finance the first Earth Day, which was not and still is not anti-nuclear. That leaves it ambiguous whether his gift to Friends of the Earth was intended explicitly to oppose nuclear power or merely to support the environment.

The documentary states that it is based on a 2019 book, A Bright Future, which also calls for building much more nuclear power quickly. Although one of the book’s authors, Joshua Goldstein, is a non-scientist, international trade expert, the other, Staffan Qvist, is trained as a nuclear engineer and says he works as a “clean-energy” engineer. Stone and Goldstein are co-authors of Nuclear Now. Neither claims any formal training in nuclear engineering.

With filmmaker Stone directing, the documentary’s production values are good. He also narrates it forcefully. The film presents the history of nuclear power, starting with Enrico Fermi’s first nuclear reactor in 1942, assembled in a University of Chicago squash court. It describes the U.S. Navy later building a fleet of over 100 nuclear submarines, and then the American civilian nuclear power industry building more than 100 of the same kind of reactor on land—one that uses ordinary water to slow down neutrons and cool itself.

The documentary and book take an oddly casual view of the problems of storing spent nuclear fuel while it’s still radioactive. In a very controversial statement, the film claims that “Scientists actually know that nuclear waste doesn’t travel very far” if it leaks out of an underground repository. Since radiation is all around us, the book adds, it wouldn’t be “catastrophic” if some leaked out.

Contrary to the film’s cavalier assertion, however, every reactor fueled with Uranium-238 will automatically produce Plutonium-239 after fissioning, and that deadly element must not be allowed to leak out for the next 241,000 years, because it can cause fatal lung cancer if breathed in. No one can predict for certain what will happen underground that long from now. Homo Sapiens did not exist 241,000 years ago, only its precursor species. It is unlikely that any human-built structure has ever remained completely leak-tight for even 1,000 years.

Rather than tackle that problem, however, the book recommends leaving the waste in above-ground concrete casks for 100 years while some of the radioactivity decays and then letting our great-great-grandchildren worry about it. Why should they mind being saddled with our mess? 

The documentary defends nuclear power as the safest energy source of all time. It misleadingly claims that no one died at Three Mile Island or Fukushima, when it’s still not certain that no one will ever die from cancer from those accidents, because radioactivity was released by both of them.

The documentary also presents as fact that only about 50 people died at the scene at Chernobyl, and that only about 4,000 more people will die later from radiation-caused cancers. However, the 2006 TORCH report (The Other Report on Chernobyl), commissioned by the European Parliament’s Green Party and analyzed by two British radiation biologists, estimated that somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 people will ultimately die from Chernobyl cancers.

The major argument of the documentary and the book is that although society needs to build as much renewable energy as possible, especially wind and solar power, that can never be accomplished fast enough to stop all fossil fuel emissions by 2050 and limit global warming to 2 degrees. Therefore, we must build as many new nuclear power plants as possible simultaneously.

The renowned climate scientist James Hansen claims that “This is the most informative film—ever.” But  it is nowhere near that unique. For one thing, the documentary and the book suffer from the book’s being somewhat out of date. The most recent footnotes (2018) are already five years old. In the chapters that predict the future of renewables, the oldest footnotes are now 15 years old. That’s an eternity when renewable power prices are dropping steadily nearly every year.

The New York Times reviewer Brandon Yu claims that the documentary “makes a compelling case for [nuclear power] as the energy source that can most reasonably and realistically help us face the [climate] crisis.” In fact, it does no such thing. Yu never compared the evidence for nuclear power to that of its main alternative, renewable power. So, he doesn’t know which one is preferable.

Yu didn’t compare the two energy sources because neither the book nor the documentary ever presents a head-to-head comparison of the costs and construction times necessary to build enough nuclear or renewable power fast enough. What viewers need is a formal cost and construction-time analysis. Instead, they’re left with the book’s unsubstantiated claim: “What the world already knows how to do in 10 or 20 years using nuclear power would take more than a century using renewables alone.” In truth, the needed number of new nuclear plants worldwide could never be built in two decades, judging from how long other reactors have typically required. According to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2022, the 62 reactors completed worldwide in the decade between 2012 and 2021 took an average of 9.2 years to build.

The only nuclear plant now under construction in the United States, Vogtle 3 and 4 in Georgia, has been markedly slow and expensive to build. The Vogtle 3 reactor and its twin built on the same site, Vogtle 4, were begun in 2009 and were supposed to be finished in seven years. Fourteen years later, Unit 3 finally entered commercial service on July 31 after several false starts. Unit 4 should be finished early next year. Originally estimated to cost $14 billion altogether, they have already cost $35 billion.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration Annual 2023 Energy Outlook, a large nuclear power plant that begins construction this year will, when completed, sell its electricity at 17 cents per kilowatt-hour. But both wind and solar plants begun this year will ultimately sell their power at 4 cents per KW-hr, one-quarter as expensive. (Don’t be confused by the fact that renewable power only operates when the wind blows or the sun is shining. That fact is irrelevant to any nuclear-renewable performance comparison, because the machines only create energy and accumulate kilowatt-hours of performance when they are operating, not when they’re shut down.)

In addition, many American experts believe that large nuclear plants have become so prohibitively expensive that no more will ever be built in the U.S. Instead, small modular reactors (SMRs), creating 30 percent or less of the power of large ones, will take their place.

However, even the model of SMR most similar to current reactors and closest to being constructed, the NuScale reactor, recently announced that it expects to sell its electricity at 11.9 cents per unsubsidized KW-hr, before a years-long, 3-cent per KW-hr temporary subsidy is subtracted. That equals three times the expected cost of renewable power. Since the NuScale has never been built anywhere before and its reactor must first be redesigned, its price per KW-hr may well wind up costing as much or more than the 17 cents that large reactors would.

As expensive as the NuScale reactor may turn out to be, it’s clear that it will be cheaper than all the other proposed “advanced” SMRs that the Department of Energy is building, because none of them utilize water for cooling. Instead, they use exotic coolants like liquid sodium, molten salt or inert gas. Large-size versions of all these other reactors failed in the marketplace between the 1950s and the 1980s, so as new SMRs, they will be extremely expensive to engineer.

In addition, Stanford Professor Mark Z. Jacobson calculates from the exorbitant cost of the Vogtle reactors that any new nuclear power plants of any size will cost five to ten times as much as renewable plants, not just three to four times as much.

What all these analyses further make clear is that Congress should stop allocating billions of dollars to the Department of Energy to subsidize SMRs. Being so much more expensive than renewable power plants, these small plants will never be able to compete with renewables economically. Once DoE stops subsidizing them, they will go out of business. No utility wants to spend what will likely be much, much greater than 12 cents per KW-hr for nuclear power when they can buy renewable power for 4 cents per KW-hr.

Yet another reason why Congress should stop subsidizing SMRs is that they are inherently less economical than large nuclear plants, because they must spread fixed costs like salaries over the fewer kilowatt-hours of energy they create relative to higher-powered reactors. That makes their electricity cost more per KW-hr than that of much more powerful reactors. This built-in diseconomy of scale makes it quite possible that no SMR will ever be able to turn a profit, even if it could somehow find customers willing to pay three to ten times what renewable power costs.

Finally, there is considerable evidence now that renewables alone can be built fast enough to stop all power plant fossil fuel emissions by 2050. The 2021 Princeton University Net-Zero America report shows that that goal can be met in the U.S. The 2023 book by Stanford Professor Jacobson, No Miracles Needed, presents detailed evidence that 139 nations around the world can all meet that deadline if adequately funded.

In summary, what these price and construction-time differentials mean is that nuclear power, either in large or small plants, costs somewhere between three and ten times as much per KW-hr as renewables do. That means that spending money only on renewables will pay for three to ten times as much clean electricity generation as nuclear-only would for the same cost.

Therefore, spending any more money on nuclear power is wasting money, billions of dollars per year. It’s like fighting world hunger by feeding some people caviar. Given limited resources, doing that means forcing many others to starve needlessly. With respect to climate, providing overly expensive nuclear power for some folks means that others will go without the renewable energy that they need and could otherwise easily have had.

The truth is crystal clear: In our current world of rapid and uncontrolled climate change, there is no longer any rational role for new nuclear power. It is way too slow to build and way too expensive. To save ourselves, we must stop building it. We must instead build only renewable power plants from now on.

Dr. John Miller is a career science reporter, a former U.S. Navy submarine nuclear engineering officer, and a Ph.D. social psychologist.

Headline photo of Oliver Stone with Vladimir Putin, another occasion on which the American director courted controversy for his documentary series, The Putin Interviews. (Photo: Пресс-служба Президента России/Wikimedia Commons.)

The opinions expressed in articles by outside contributors and published on the Beyond Nuclear International website, are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Beyond Nuclear. However, we try to offer a broad variety of viewpoints and perspectives as part of our mission “to educate and activate the public about the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the need to abandon both to safeguard our future”.