New nuclear technologies are important, but researchers warn against a great fallacy

This Saturday, an energy era in Germany will finally come to an end. With the decommissioning of the remaining three nuclear power plants Isar 2, Emsland and Neckarwestheim 2, Germany says goodbye to nuclear energy. How sensible this step is – opinions differ in politics. Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) emphasized that Germany’s energy security would also be secured without the nuclear power plants. SPD faction deputy Matthias Miersch welcomed the move compared to the news portal web.de: Nuclear power is a “high-risk, expensive technology that produces highly toxic waste for 30,000 generations.”

Criticism, on the other hand, comes from the coalition partner FDP and from the opposition. “For me it is clear: If the Union wins the next federal election, there should be an extension of nuclear energy,” announced Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) even in an interview with FOCUS online. Because: “For pragmatic reasons, switching off nuclear energy makes no sense at this point in time.”

Snoring Republic of Germany?

Söder also mentions another criticism of the nuclear phase-out: With the end of nuclear power, there are significantly fewer incentives in Germany to research new nuclear technologies. While a whole series of Western industrial nations are working on so-called mini-reactors and nuclear fusion, Germany is threatening to withdraw from this future field.

Bavaria will therefore “enter research into new nuclear fusion,” said Söder to FOCUS online. The recent technological breakthroughs are “remarkable”, according to the Prime Minister: “We must not squander this opportunity and only leave it to others.” But how big is this opportunity? Is Germany really snoring the technologies of the future?

Searching for the “Holy Grail”

To do this, we first have to clarify which technologies are involved. The most exciting research fields in the field of nuclear energy are currently nuclear fusion on the one hand and so-called “small modular reactors” (SMR) on the other. The latter are basically reactors that are smaller than conventional models and can be manufactured in a factory, so to speak, on a line. The SMRs are said to be more flexible, easier to maintain and safer than ordinary reactors.

The principle of nuclear fusion is a bit harder to explain. There, instead of being split, hydrogen nuclei are fused together (i.e., fused) and become helium nuclei. Because helium nuclei are lighter than hydrogen nuclei, the process releases energy. In principle, our sun is nothing more than a gigantic nuclear fusion reactor: Inside, too, hydrogen nuclei fuse to form helium nuclei – with the result that the sun shines.

The big advantage: In contrast to nuclear fission, nuclear fusion is absolutely safe and leaves no waste. So if mankind succeeded in developing an economically viable process for nuclear fusion, it would have gained a fundamentally infinite and clean source of energy. Nuclear fusion is “the holy grail of the world’s energy problems,” said physics professor Gianluca Gregori of Britain’s Oxford University last year.

Briefly begging for money from the state

The problem, however, is that both mini reactors and nuclear fusion are still a long way from being ready for the market. Two so-called SMRs are currently being used as prototypes worldwide, one in China and one in Russia. The US is currently funding the development of SMRs with hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money from President Joe Biden’s major climate stimulus program, the “Inflation Reduction Act”. Several prototypes are currently going through the approval process there. South Korea is also working on its own mini-reactors, as is the British Rolls-Royce group.

However, setbacks are the order of the day with SMRs. Rolls-Royce originally targeted 2029 as the launch date, but are now loosely talking about the early 2030s in press releases. Instead, the company’s reactor division is struggling to survive financially. “We’re on the edge of the cliff, the money will run out by the end of 2024,” chief lobbyist Alastair Evans told Reuters in early March. The British government must now create planning security as quickly as possible and make a binding announcement as to how many of the reactors it wants to buy.

In general, the mini-reactors still have a few problems to overcome before they are marketable: there is still no scalable production model, the approval procedures are extremely complicated, and finding a location is not much easier than with conventional nuclear power plants. According to a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the first SMRs will not go online until the 2030s at the earliest. “There will hardly be any electricity from such nuclear power plants in Germany before 2040 if the debate is opened now,” says Matthias Huber, Professor of Energy Systems and Energy Distribution at the Technical University of Ingolstadt, to FOCUS online Earth. “That’s, I think, the time horizon to talk about.”

Energy generation with the super laser

The situation with nuclear fusion is even more complicated. It is true that US researchers only achieved a scientific sensation in December: the research team from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California carried out nuclear fusion for the first time, in which more energy was ultimately generated than was consumed. It shouldn’t take longer than ten years until commercial use, a euphoric Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger (FDP) announced in the “Heute Journal”, “it can also take a little longer, but we have to set ourselves ambitions.” Also US President Joe Biden has given the US Department of Energy a 10-year goal.

However, the research team itself considers this timeframe to be utopian. One has now found “a way to a goal,” said Kimberly Budil, director of the laboratory, when presenting the results in mid-December. “But we’re still a long way from that at the moment.” In fact, the researchers still face huge obstacles: Despite the research breakthrough, the overall energy balance of the process is still negative. The fusion required a superlaser that was unique in the world. And the energy generated would first have to be converted before it could be used as electricity, with major losses in efficiency. Since 2010, the EU and the federal government have been promoting the so-called Iter fusion reactor in southern France – which has so far only generated billions in costs, but no usable energy.

“Not assuming they can be competitive”

So does it still make sense to persist in researching such relatively untested technologies? “Basically, it is right, especially in research, to advance various technical solutions that are open to technology,” says Andreas Fischer, economist for energy and climate policy at the Cologne Institute for Economic Research (IW) on FOCUS online Earth. “However, it has so far been difficult to foresee when these technologies will be available on a significant scale and what share of the energy supply they can really provide. Likewise, it cannot be assumed for the time being that they can be competitive compared to established technologies.”

Because: The energy transition must be advanced more quickly – we simply do not have the time to wait perhaps 30 years for another breakthrough in nuclear fusion. “I think nuclear fusion makes sense, but we shouldn’t assume that it will help us with the current climate problem in the first half of the 21st century,” agrees Huber. Fischer therefore calls for “currently to push those technologies more forward in the expansion that are already available and also have clear advantages from an economic point of view – namely renewable energies including grid expansion and hydrogen infrastructures”.

The technology fallacy

And indeed: SMRs and nuclear fusion are not necessary for a clean, inexpensive energy system of the future. We already have the technology for this, with wind power and solar, with storage, smart grids and hydrogen. Especially since exciting technical wonders are still happening there, Fischer points out. “For example, the generator output of newly approved wind turbines in Germany increased by around 80 percent on average between 2015 and 2022.”

This does not mean that funds for research into new nuclear technologies cannot be sensibly invested. But every euro that is invested in future technology with an unclear perspective is a euro that could also flow into the future technology that already exists. What matters is the right relationship – and realistic expectations.