In the timeless words of Conan Doyle’s famous detective, Sherlock Holmes: “Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

So, let's try this out for size in the context of nuclear power. It would surely be completely impossible for any responsible government pursuing its Net Zero energy strategy to prioritize nuclear power over all other options, given that:

  • Large-scale nuclear reactors are now by far the most expensive option (on a bundled cost of energy basis). UK government figures in July this year showed new nuclear at £109 per MWh, offshore wind at £44 per MWh, large-scale solar at £41 per MWh, and onshore wind at £38 per MWh.

  • Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) don't yet exist, but all experts agree their electricity will be even more expensive than that of large reactors—precisely because they can't achieve the same economies of scale.

  • The contribution of both big and small new reactors to a Net Zero electricity system (in the UK and USA) will be literally zero before 2035 at the very earliest.

  • Both big and small reactors will continue to produce significant levels of nuclear waste, adding to a waste crisis to which no country has yet found a long-term solution.

  • All nuclear facilities pose a significant security risk, both from the point of view of cybersecurity (more on this later) and the very real possibility of physical attacks by ‘hostile third parties.’

The list is longer than that, but I'll stop there simply because that's more than enough to demonstrate that it would surely be impossible for any responsible government to favor nuclear power over every other option.

This brings us to the extraordinarily improbable truth of it: these days, nuclear power has little to do with electricity generation and a whole lot more to do with the maintenance of nuclear weapons programs.

If I'd offered you that (admittedly controversial) view five years ago, I suspect most readers would have dismissed it out of hand—after decades of being reassured by their governments that there was a world of difference between nuclear weapons and nuclear power. “Atoms for Peace,” as U.S. President Eisenhower so deceitfully put it way back in 1953. Denials since then as to the links were constant, forceful, and a critical part of the propaganda for nuclear power—on the persuasive grounds that “support for nuclear power will never get stronger until the technologies are separated in people's minds,” as argued by M.V. Ramana in his newly published (and excellent) Nuclear is Not the Solution. In other words, to sell it, you've got to separate them out.

Well, that's all gone now. In a staggeringly cynical volte-face, governments with nuclear weapons are now falling over themselves to demonstrate just how much their citizens benefit from the closest possible linkage between nuclear power and their nuclear weapons capability. In 2020, President Macron spelled it out: “Without civilian nuclear energy, there is no military use of this technology, and without military use, there is no civilian nuclear energy.”

It took a while for the UK government to catch up, but the latest Nuclear Roadmap no longer beats around the bush; it once sweated profusely to claim that it didn't exist. There are multiple references to the synergies between nuclear power and nuclear weapons: “This government will proactively look for opportunities to align the delivery of the civil and nuclear defense enterprises. It acknowledges the crucial importance of the nuclear industry to our national security, both in terms of energy supply and the defense nuclear enterprise,” and so on.

The USA was always better at the lies it told. After all, the U.S. Department of Energy has in its founding charter “the promotion of nuclear power and production of nuclear weapons.” And in a leaked memo from 2018, the gaffe was definitively blown: “The entire U.S. nuclear enterprise... depends on a robust civilian nuclear industry. If the civilian capabilities were to deteriorate further, U.S. nuclear defense capabilities (infrastructure, supply chain, and expertise) would similarly suffer.”

Big corporations are loving the fact that this is now out in the open. Bechtel, Babcock & Wilcox, AECOM, and Rolls-Royce—they've all spent decades feeding at the trough of either overt or hidden cross-subsidies between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Rolls-Royce has been one of the most outspoken advocates for small modular reactors, arguing their importance back in 2017 “to relieve the Ministry of Defense of the burden of retaining the skills and capability.”

We do indeed live in different times.

Not least because most people are feeling a lot less secure about the world in which we now live. Putin's invasion of Ukraine has seriously spooked NATO governments, and defense budgets are ramping up year after year. China's military ambitions become clearer by the month, and its aggressive positioning in the South China Sea is seen by security experts as a sign of things to come. No wonder the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has reset the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds before midnight.

Even though the vast majority of people will be completely unaware of any official policy changes, most undoubtedly feel less apprehensive about these nuclear synergies. Nuclear disarmament comes a long way down their priority lists. This means we can expect governments to get even more brazen about these nuclear co-dependencies, whether that's a question of technology overlaps (with the defense establishment acknowledging, for instance, that building and operating nuclear-propelled submarines would be insanely expensive without hidden cross-subsidies from the nuclear power industry) or the increasingly explicit ‘revolving doors’ as senior personnel hop back and forth between military and civilian roles.

Beyond that, geopolitically speaking, it's still an article of faith that “having a seat at the top table” in international terms means retaining one’s ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent. Which, by extension, means retaining a civilian nuclear industry—regardless of the economic consequences, regardless of whether or not nuclear power makes any sense at all in any Net Zero strategy.

As anti-nuclear critics point out, however, there is a striking and potentially lethal irony here. As nuclear nations double down on nuclear power, it is blindingly obvious that they are ramping up serious threats to national security.

Nowhere is this clearer than with the drive to develop SMRs. Most designs currently on the drawing board (that are not light water reactors) will be using as their fuel high-assay, low-enriched uranium—or HALEU, to use the jargon. When it’s first extracted from the earth, uranium concentrations are usually around 1% of the total volume of the ore. HALEU fuel has to be enriched up to around 19%—just below the 20% threshold for the kind of highly enriched uranium judged to be viable for the manufacture of nuclear bombs.

(In further irony, the only current source of HALEU fuel in the world today is Russia.) This is already a massive headache for the industry, as creating that capability closer to home will entail significant investment. In other words, even higher costs.)

But we are playing for much higher stakes than that. In this new, increasingly insecure world, every new nuclear facility becomes a target for ‘hostile third parties,’ be they terrorist organizations or belligerent nation-states such as Russia and China.

Welcome to the inconceivably scary world of nuclear cyberwarfare. Despite the highest grade of propaganda promoted by the Ministry of Defence here in the UK—that all nuclear facilities are ‘bomb-proof’ (I kid you not!)—most cyber experts grudgingly acknowledge that this is just bullshit when it comes to cyber defense. And we have no finer example of that than Sellafield, one of the most hazardous nuclear waste and decommissioning sites in the world, sprawling across 2 square miles on the Cumbrian coast. Back in December 2023, a Guardian exclusive revealed that Sellafield had been hacked into ‘by cyber groups closely linked to Russia and China’ since 2015, despite years of cover-ups by senior staff. “The full extent of any data loss and any continuing risks to systems was made harder to quantify by Sellafield's failure to alert nuclear regulators for several years.”

The denials didn't last long. The Guardian’s painstaking research over 18 months had got Sellafield bang to rights. In October 2024, it was fined £400,000 by the Office for Nuclear Regulation after it pleaded guilty to criminal charges over years of cybersecurity breaches. Astonishingly, the ONR also found that 75% of its computer servers were vulnerable to cyberattack.

At which point, it's worth remembering that Sellafield houses the largest store of plutonium on the planet.

So much for the cybersecurity story. Putin's invasion of Ukraine and its occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor (the largest in Europe) tell us all we need to know about the possibility of physical risks when every nuclear facility becomes a target for any hostile third party. Why use your own nuclear weapons (with all the risks of escalation that this entails) when you can just take out your enemy’s nuclear power stations?

What a tangled nuclear web our governments weave in pursuit of their lethally improbable objectives. Nearly 30 years ago, Sir Michael Atiyah, then President of the UK’s Royal Society, said this: “I believe history will show that insistence on a UK nuclear capability (both weapons and energy) was fundamentally misguided, a total waste of resources, and a significant factor in our relative economic decline over the past 50 years.”