Nuclear Power Investors Are Holding Back a Revival
If you want less fossil fuels, use the uranium rather than buy and hold it.
Reviving nuclear energy.
Photographer: Nathan Laine/BloombergJudging by the headlines, you’d expect 2024 to have been a bumper year for nuclear fuel. After more than a decade in hibernation, since Japan’s Fukushima Dai’ichi meltdown, political and corporate support for atomic energy is probably stronger now than it has been at any point since the 1970s.
Hitting the target announced at the COP28 climate conference last December for a threefold increase in nuclear capacity by 2050 will be tough. It would require about as many reactors globally each year as were connected over the previous two decades put together. And yet governments — from atom-loving France, through vacillating Japan to anti-nuclear Italy — are putting their shoulders to the wheel.