Why history should tell us the future is not nuclear

On April 26, 2026, we marked a grim anniversary. Forty years since the tragic accident at Chernobyl, its impact still reverberates. 

In 2015, about 1.8 million people were officially recognized as victims of the disaster in Ukraine alone.  

The radioactive fallout’s impact on neighboring countries, most evident in Belarus and Russia, has also been scientifically confirmed, and the event’s sheer horror is permanently seared in our collective psyche. 

In Chernobyl’s aftermath, we can see the undoing of the myth of the ‘peaceful atom’, a term coined by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, to denote fissile technology’s non-military use. Nuclear energy production, however, was never peaceful. 

From the very process of nuclear fission to the complex web of dependency and debt behind nuclear power build-out, to the potentially devastating accidents and the inextricably related proliferation of nuclear weapons, the common thread is destruction.

Today’s renewed interest in nuclear power threatens to bring further destruction: of communities, livelihoods and national economies. 

Urgewald’s report, Debt, Delays, Dependencies: Why Public Banks Should Not Support Nuclear Power, makes clear: Nuclear energy is not economically viable, neither today nor at any point in the future. It remains significantly more expensive than renewable energy, and no nuclear project has delivered on its original promises on cost or construction time.

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Renewable energy sources are the most direct path to cutting emissions and combating energy poverty worldwide. However, multilateral institutions like the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and others are stubbornly marching towards an economic disaster. 

Worse yet, nuclear power generation creates toxic waste and exacerbates the climate crisis by redirecting scarce resources away from technologies that have long proven cheaper, faster, cleaner and more effective. To make matters worse, the costs of nuclear waste management and power plant decommissioning are likely to far exceed industry estimates. 

By investing in nuclear energy, multilateral development banks are saddling future generations with radioactive waste that they will have to manage and pay for – likely over centuries. 

At the time of writing, there is but one final nuclear waste storage facility in the world: Onkalo, Finland. Commissioning is scheduled for mid-2026. It took 22 years and €1 billion to build. Despite the word ‘final’, the underground facility has an official operational window of roughly one century, and geologic disposal of nuclear waste is still “fraught with uncertainties” according to experts.  

All other final repository projects globally have been stalling for decades, many with no clear end in sight. The combination of ballooning costs and protracted lead times makes nuclear power unfit to address the climate and the energy crises we face. 

At the same time, nuclear power plants are increasingly vulnerable to the very impacts of climate change, with potentially disastrous consequences. 

Contrary to common claims, nuclear power is not well suited to complement renewable energy sources. Instead, a rapid expansion of grid infrastructure and storage capacity is needed to enable the transition to a fully renewable energy system.

None of these systemic challenges will be solved by new technologies or reactor designs, not even by the overhyped small modular reactors (SMRs). The core problems are structural and no amount of innovation is liable to circumvent them. 

In fact, electricity from SMRs will be even more expensive per megawatt-hour, and some studies suggest the radioactive waste will be more, too.

Nuclear power is incompatible with development. Investing in nuclear power creates new and lasting dependencies: decades of high debt burden and geopolitical reliance on a small number of nuclear-exporting countries, mainly Russia. 

The result is predictable: high costs ultimately passed on to consumers and taxpayers, multiple generations over. A kiss of death in the development context.

Multilateral development banks should stop investing in false hopes, outdated technologies and demonstrably misleading promises. Instead, they should prioritize already proven energy solutions that truly benefit people and the planet. 

It is time to bid farewell to the never ‘peaceful atom’.

The author would like to thank Merete Looft, Vladimir Slivyak, Prof. Stephen Thomas, Dr. Alexander Wimmers, Prof. M.V. Ramana, Dr. Paul Dorfman and Prof. Claudia Kemfert for their contributions to the report Debt, Delays, Dependencies: Why Public Banks Should Not Support Nuclear Power, on which this text is based.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ute Koczy is a senior campaigner for multilateral development banks at Urgewald, with a focus on the World Bank. She combines political and campaigning experience to help exert civic control over development banks and hold them to account when the projects they fund cause environmental and social harm.