What if the huge financial backing that has gone to nuclear power since World War Two had gone mostly to renewables instead?

By Rupert Read and Joe Eastoe.

As of data from 2022, fossil fuels still dominate global energy production, accounting for 81.8% of the total. Of the remaining 18.2%, 7.5% comes from renewables, 6.7% comes from hydroelectricity, and just 4% comes from nuclear, despite the hugely disproportionately high amount of funding and subsidies that the nuclear energy industry has received throughout the last 75 years. There are currently 410 nuclear power reactors across the world, most of which reside in North America (although Far East Asia is looking to surpass them). It’s extremely hard to find a figure of total global expenditure on nuclear energy, partly because the R&D costs were split between civil infrastructure and military development, but mainly because of the shadow of secrecy between the East and West during the Cold War (as well as because of the huge ‘hidden subsidies’ nuclear enjoys, which we address briefly below). However, it is no secret that nuclear energy enjoys a massive amount of funding across much of the world. The UK gives eye-watering subsides for nuclear energy projects, like the one currently being mooted at Hinkley Point C. According to IISD, the UK government has agreed a guaranteed price of energy per MWh generated by the station, a rate of £92.50 per MWh for 35 years, compared to around £47.50 per MWh that the average price was in 2012 when the deal was made, which the government calculated could cost between £4 and £19 billion. The UK government has also agreed loan guarantees and waste disposal cost caps, meaning the costs of payments that get stuck in the funding pipelines falls on the government, as do any waste disposal expenditure over £5 billion; this last point is of course utterly significant, given that this is in effect an open-ended subsidy to disaster-prone nuclear. Professor Keith Barnham claimed in 2016 that the UK taxpayer could end up paying £53 billion in subsidies for Hinkley Point C. Elsewhere, according to a 2018 report by the Congressional Research Service, investment in the US between 1948 and 2018 in nuclear energy totalled $109.59 billion, accounting for 47.8% of total Energy Technology funding. In comparison, renewable energy enjoyed just $29.35 billion, accounting for 12.8% of the total share (considerably less than fossil fuels; 54.96 billion and 24%).

Now, what if those figures were reversed? What would the world be like if, for whatever reason, nuclear were a fringe technology and it was wind and solar that had received billions in public funding and subsides to boost development and infrastructure? Most importantly, what would this shift to truly renewable energies mean for the public consciousness and the broader struggle against climate meltdown?

Many of the following events will seem familiar; some are historically the same, others are modified in accordance to the proposed questions above. The counter-factual history that follows starts by tracking our actual history, and then diverges from the late 1950s, focusing on how our world could have been altered had the economic might that was thrust towards nuclear energy been directed towards renewables instead.