Due mainly to the momentum of China and India, nuclear energy production will soon recover the record, as announced by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in a report. Nuclear energy will be the all-time highest by 2025, exceeding production in 2021.

The EIA expects that by 2026 nuclear and “renewable” will for the first time exceed coal in energy production. This growth is mainly due to the new reactors built in China, India and South Korea, as well as to the launch of reactors already stationed in the French State and Japan.

But this new nuclear momentum will not be free. Only the annual impact on nuclear power stations must be analysed.

Continuous problems within power plants...

The Spanish state has recently reported the number of “incidents” in reactors in 2023, 40 times more than last year, of which a quarter affected safety systems. And already in 2024 there has been one scare or another, such as the emergency that took place on January 15 at the Cofrentes plant in Valencia, where by mistake its owner, Iberdrola, had to lose the water supply and establish the technical stop of the reactor.

In France too, the problems are the daily bread. Two weeks ago, at the Gravelines nuclear power plant, run by the EDF company, it was discovered that the boiling meter of reactor 3 cooling channel was broken and the National Security Authority (ASN) gave level 1 to the incident.

The picture uncovered in the Penly Norman power station last March is even more serious. The plant was stopped, but during the exploration the technicians found a crack in one of the tubes in the refrigerator system, which was about to cause a radioactive leak. Since 2021, French state reactors have been suffering from numerous corrosion problems and the cracking found in Penly will force EDF to further review the control protocols.

...and external threat: earthquakes, wars and tsunamis

Nuclear power plants around the world have similar accounts, and in some cases the risk comes from outside rather than from internal failures.

Proof of this is the situation in Ukraine, the Zaporizhia plant, the largest in Europe, with the war between Russia and Ukraine. In Turkey, the earthquake at the beginning of last year highlighted the lack of safety of the nuclear power plant being built in Akkuyu: “If the reactors were filled with fuel, then we would have a huge catastrophe,” wrote Pinar Demircan, coordinator of the Nucleers nuclear platform.

In Japan, when it is not yet known how to repair the damage of the Fukushima disaster in 2011 – contaminated water from the power plant started to be thrown into the sea in August – the new year of 2024 triggered a new earthquake and tsunami alert, this time on the west coast, in the prefectures of Ishikawa, Niigata and Fukui.

Consequently, the situation of its nuclear power plants caused great concern, including the largest in the world, Kashiwazaki Kariwa. This seven-reactor power plant had been stationed since 2011, but had just obtained the reopening license on January 1 when the earthquake occurred. Tepco explained that in reactors 2 and 7, the water from nuclear fuel pools was poured out by shaking, but without leaving the facility.

The nuclear lobby has made a subpeller for the European Parliament to give the ‘green’ label to atomic energy, and the IEA says in its report that ‘clean’ sources will in future cover all global electricity demand. But the only thing that is “clear” is that that will have your reward before or after.