39 Years After Chernobyl: Nuclear's Spectacular Failure

Today marks a strange anniversary.

39 years since Chernobyl — and still, the cleanup isn’t finished.

Over 700 billion dollars spent, and counting.

If we borrowed that money, spread it over 30 years, and distributed it across every megawatt-hour produced by nuclear worldwide, it would quietly add another $10 or more to every MWh.

And that’s just Chernobyl.

Fukushima: over $200 billion in cleanup costs — and still climbing.

These events are called “rare,” but they happen roughly every twenty to twenty-five years.

And when they happen, the costs aren’t just financial. They are generational.

New reactor designs won’t change that.

Tsunamis still occur.

Earthquakes still occur.

Human failure, sabotage, and war still occur.

Even the new sarcophagus at Chernobyl — the so-called “New Safe Confinement” — will last only another hundred years. After that, we’ll need to build another. And another.

Ground zero remains hotter than Hiroshima or Nagasaki — and will stay that way for thousands of years.

What kind of logic continues this technology?

The risk may be “low,” but the consequences are unimaginably large.

When we have cheap, flexible, almost risk-free alternatives, the question stops being technical. It becomes ethical.

You can smash a solar panel. You can topple a wind turbine. You can tilt at windmills like Don Quixote all day long — and you will still never poison a continent.

Despite all this — despite the radioactive wreckage, despite the open economic collapse of nuclear in any true free market — governments still cling to the dream.

Nuclear construction has been dead in competitive markets for decades.

It has never been economical — not once — without massive state subsidy, price guarantees, and the offloading of systemic risk onto taxpayers. And that was before we deregulated and turned electrciy into a commodity.

Nuclear was never about cost. It was about spectacle. It was big bang for big bucks — an industrial monument to strength at any price.

And that’s where we are today.

Nuclear power is a potency pill for governments —struggling with complexity, paralyzed by disinformation, desperate for symbols that project force even when reason fails.

When the Russians are coming, you need something loud. Something biblical. Something Old Testament.

Fury. Vengeance. Apocalypse in a hard hat.

Perhaps we could install laser guns on wind turbines and anti aircraft missles on solar panels?

When rational planning collapses, spectacle steps in. The fantasy of “safe” nuclear isn’t about electrons. It’s about psychology.

Get real.

The argument often made is that amortized nuclear plants are cheap. But that’s not the point.

Their premiums — the massive original capital costs — have simply been swallowed over

New plants — and major renovations — are still very, very expensive. Just like they always were.

And even if nuclear is cleaner than coal or gas, the real problem isn’t just cost.

It’s time.

New nuclear projects absorb enormous amounts of investment for decades —delaying the actual delivery of clean, usable energy.

When you redirect capital into nuclear, you pull it away from renewables — technologies that could be deployed now, at scale, at falling cost.

Which raises a sharper question:

Who benefits from slowing down the deployment of solar and wind?

Because it’s not households or small businesses. And it’s certainly not the climate – which has already run out of time.

Oil, Gas, Coal, Energy Companies, Energy traders.

Even if, somehow, we miraculously created a few extra gigawatts of new nuclear capacity,  it wouldn’t solve the real problem facing Europe and Australia: electrification.

The challenge isn’t just generating a few more clean electrons for an already existing system.

The challenge is rebuilding the energy economy itself —electrifying transport, heating, industry, logistics —and doing it fast enough to decarbonize before system risks lock in.

This scale of transformation demands massive expansion of clean generation, at speed and flexibility nuclear simply can’t provide.

Solar, wind, batteries, and flexible demand systems can be deployed by thousands of actors simultaneously — households, cities, industries, farms — across millions of locations.

Nuclear can’t.

It is centralizing, capital-intensive, slow, and grid-rigid.

Even if you finish a new plant, you’re still decades behind the electrification curve.

In a world that needs speed and scale, nuclear offers neither.

When 20–50% of all transport is electric, the old model of power supply collapses.

You can no longer afford a one-way grid, built to deliver centralized generation to passive loads. You need two-way power. Everywhere.

Electric vehicles aren’t just consumers. They are batteries on wheels.

They are dynamic loads and storage assets, capable of absorbing excess generation, smoothing volatility, and even feeding power back into the grid when needed.

In that world, building new centralized nuclear plants isn’t just obsolete — it’s actively stupid.

You don’t solve a dynamic, distributed, interactive energy system by locking in more rigid, slow-response, always-on generation that can’t adapt to moment-to-moment grid conditions.

In a two-way energy system, nuclear doesn’t just underperform. It drags the entire system backward.

You can build whatever nuclear you want. Go ahead.

If governments or investors decide they need that symbol, that security, that fixed baseline — fine.

But then make sure the system invests ten times as much — in solar, wind, storage, flexible demand, and smart grids.

And if you invest disproportionately in nuclear — if you starve renewables, storage, and local flexibility to feed slow central projects —you don’t just waste money.

You lock the system into a slower, more brittle, more vulnerable future.

The math is simple:

For every euro, dollar, or pound spent on nuclear, spend ten on the technologies that can actually deliver the energy transition at speed.

Right now, Europe doesn’t need more supply.

Europe needs to invest in demand.

• Smarter demand.

• Flexible demand.

• Electrified demand.

• Demand that can shift, soak up, balance, and optimize the energy already flowing into the system.

The bottleneck isn’t a shortage of potential electrons. It’s a shortage of systems that can use electricity intelligently — heating, transport, industry, storage, buildings.

Every euro spent on building more centralized supply, without transforming demand, deepens the structural mismatch:

A grid built for variability, but a demand side still locked in rigidity.

Europe’s survival as an electrified, decarbonized economy doesn’t depend on how many new gigawatts it adds.

It depends on how quickly it can turn passive consumers into active participants.

That means:

• Electrifying heat and transport at speed.

• Building automation into homes, factories, and infrastructure.

• Designing incentives for flexibility, not just for consumption.

In this reality, investing in slow, rigid, centralized supply — nuclear or otherwise — misses the point entirely.

The energy transition won’t be won by who builds the biggest plant.

It will be won by who mobilizes the fastest system-wide flexibility.

What makes a real strategic difference is deploying more electric vehicles, more heat pumps, more electrified industry, more smart buildings —more demand that can absorb, shape, and stabilize renewable energy as it flows.

Every EV plugged into a smart charger, every home heated by a heat pump, every industrial process switched from gas to electricity, shifts the system closer to resilience and self-balancing.