Image by Lukáš Lehotský.
Rafael Grossi, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Director General, has been busy over the last few years. The media has often reported on his efforts to highlight “the risk of a major nuclear accident” at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Grossi has also met with Russian President Vladimir Putin twice to discuss the situation at Zaporizhzhia, arguing that a “severe nuclear accident…would recognize no borders” and “we must do everything possible to prevent” such an accident.
But Grossi has also simultaneously been increasing the risk of accidents, albeit inadvertently, by calling for building more nuclear reactors. This advocacy takes many forms. He has written op-eds in prominent outlets like Foreign Affairs. He has been trying to canvas countries to start nuclear power programs. For example, in March 2024. he went to Baghdad and committed to working with Iraq to help build a nuclear reactor “for peaceful purposes”. And as a way to deal with the unaffordable costs of nuclear reactors, he has pushed the World Bank and Asian Development Bank to provide funding for building nuclear plants.
None of this make sense. When viewed as investment advice to banks, Grossi’s promotion of nuclear power does not meet the laugh threshold. According to Grossi, the banks’ lack of funding for nuclear energy is “out of date, out of step with what is happening”. But it is Grossi’s advocacy that is out of step with happening to nuclear energy in the real world.
When nuclear energy is evaluated through how much it contributes to the world’s electricity production, the technology has been declining continuously for over 25 years, from 17.5 percent in 1996 down to 9.2 percent in 2022. For reasons discussed later, this trend will likely continue. In other words, the importance of nuclear energy is diminishing. Investing more money into a technology that some scholars argue is “destined for decline” makes little sense.
When analyzing Grossi’s advice to these development banks, one should remember what these institutions are supposed to do. The World Bank’s mission is “to end extreme poverty and boost prosperity on a livable planet”. And the Asian Development Bank has a similar mission, with a regional focus on Asia and the Pacific. The World Bank’s mission, in particular, mentions the multiple, intertwined crises we are confronting and emphasizes both the need for “affordable energy” and how quickly these crises should be addressed, stating “time is of the essence”. Nuclear energy fails on both counts.
Expensive and Slow
Electricity from nuclear reactors is costly and does not provide affordable energy, especially when compared to other low-carbon, renewable sources of energy. During the same period mentioned earlier, the share of all electricity generated by modern renewables has risen from just over 1 percent of in 1996 to 15.9 percent in 2023. Today, it is utility-scale solar photovoltaic power that provides the least costly option for generating electricity plants in many countries. This is why, in 2020, the International Energy Agency dubbed solar “the new king of the world’s electricity markets”. Money spent on nuclear reactors by banks would only divert funds away from investing in renewables and associated technologies and infrastructures.
Nuclear reactors have also almost never been on time. An astonishing 89 percent of all reactors that were connected to the grid between 2020 and 2022 were delayed: just two reactors in China were on schedule. In the United States, the two AP1000 reactors that just started operating in the state of Georgia ended up costing nearly $35 billion. In 2011, when the utility company building the reactor sought permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it projected a total cost of $14 billion, and “in-service dates of 2016 and 2017” for the two units. These cost escalations and delays are even more extreme than the historical pattern identified in an academic study that examined 180 nuclear power projects and found that 175 had exceeded their initial budgets, by an average of 117%, and took 64% longer than initially projected
That is not all. Around the world, 92 nuclear projects have been cancelled or suspended, usually after hundreds of millions, if not billions, have been spent. In the United States, the latest such cancellation was a project involving a small modular reactor from NuScale that the company advertised as “smaller, safer, and cheaper”. Cheaper, it certainly wasn’t, with a final cost estimate that was around 250% more than the initial per megawatt cost for the Vogtle project in Georgia. The earlier cancellation, of the V. C. Summer project involving two AP1000 reactors in South Carolina, was canceled after over $9 billion was spent—electricity consumers in the state will be paying for decades for this bad investment.
Necessary Conditions for Nuclear Power
It is not as though development banks have not considered nuclear energy. Back in 1959, the World Bank did invest in a nuclear project in Italy, based on a set of conditions, most importantly the unavailability of other cost-competitive alternatives. That project was not a success. More important for the present discussion is that with the reduced cost and increasing availability of solar and wind power, nuclear power no longer meets these conditions to be cost-effective. 
The Asian Development Bank (ADB), too, undertook an analysis of various technologies and published an Energy Policy paper in 2009 that highlighted a number of barriers confronting nuclear power development, including “public concerns related to nuclear proliferation, waste management, safety issues, high investment costs, long lead times, and commercial acceptability of new technologies”. Thanks to these concerns, the paper declared that “ADB will maintain its current policy of non-involvement in the financing of nuclear power generation”. None of these barriers have disappeared.
The challenge of ensuring safety was reinforced just two years after the ADB’s paper when multiple reactors at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant melted down spreading radioactive materials widely, and posing difficult technical, socio-political and economical challenges: including an estimated future bill of 35 to 80 trillion yen (around $322 to $736 billion). Fukushima served as a reminder that the nature of nuclear technology ensures “the inevitability of accidents”.
The Unlearned Lessons of Zaporizhzhia
A different route to a severe nuclear accident is on display at the Zaporizhzhia power plant—and Grossi has been eloquent about how such an accident will “have ripples and reverberations all over the world”. But instead of considering Zaporizhzhia as a wake-up call to reflect on whether the world should continue to build more nuclear power plants, Grossi has taken recourse to advocating for five principles of nuclear safety and security. Unfortunately for him these rules are unlikely to be widely accepted—as evidenced by the many attacks on the Zaporizhzhia plant.
This is not for lack of precedence. Well before Russia occupied Zaporizhzhia, Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 and, then in 2007, bombed the Al-Kibar nuclear facility where Syria was building a reactor. Iran and the United States have also attacked Iraq’s nuclear facilities. None of the attackers faced any consequences.
Grossi’s principles and calls for new regimes might also contradict other imperatives. In a recent paper published in The Nonproliferation Review, two scholars have examined the history of such attacks in detail and concluded that “attacks on nuclear facilities endure as a feature of the global nonproliferation regime because the international community—or at least some of the most influential members of the community—deem them a necessary option for the maintenance of that regime”. In other words, Zaporizhzhia is unlikely to be the last nuclear plant at risk of being attacked.
None of this information is new but they don’t appear to play any part in Grossi’s advocacy for nuclear energy. When advising the World Bank to invest in nuclear power, he doesn’t explain that the tens of billions of dollars the Bank might invest in a nuclear reactor could, within a matter of minutes, be converted into a cleanup project that would cost hundreds of billions. Or explaining to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni that the small modular reactors he recommended that Italy build could be blown up and the result might, as with Zaporizhzhia, cause “enormous suffering”.
Grossi’s silence about this risk should be troubling at the best of times. But it is particularly inexcusable when he is, in parallel, emphasizing the risks of suffer a major accident at the Zaporizhzhia power plant. When he went to Iraq recently, he actively downplayed the legitimate concerns in that country thanks to its nuclear reactors being bombed by Israel and the United States. Grossi’s prescription is to simply call for “turning the page on this complex past”. Can he genuinely and credibly assure Iraq that such an attack will not happen again?
The deeper problem is a conflict of interest. As the head of the International Atomic Energy, Rafael Grossi, like his predecessors, tasked with two separate objectives: “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world” and to “ensure, so far as it is able, that assistance provided by it or at its request or under its supervision or control is not used in such a way as to further any military purpose”. The case for promoting nuclear energy was never very strong and has completely collapsed in recent years. It is past time to simply abandon the first objective and focus on the second.
