I usually do not write about my home country, Austria, but today I want to make an exception. There are debates to be had about how effective propaganda can truly be, and while the evidence differs from case to case, I cannot think of a more successful campaign than that waged by the opponents of nuclear energy. A technology that would be hailed as a humanity-saving miracle if it were invented today has become one of the most maligned issues in the world. And nowhere with more success than in Austria.
The latest Eurobarometer survey on science and technology contains a number that deserves more attention than it has received. Across the European Union, 56 per cent of citizens now believe that nuclear energy will have a positive effect on their way of life over the next twenty years. In Finland, the figure is 71 per cent, in the Czech Republic 77 per cent, in Poland 69 per cent, in France 66 per cent. In Austria, it is 25 per cent. No other EU member state scores lower.
Austria, a country that has never operated a single nuclear power plant (even though we did build one, only to then have a referendum on whether to turn it on – and you can guess how that went), that imports a considerable share of its electricity from Czech reactors located a few dozen kilometres from the border, and that compensates for the absence of domestic nuclear capacity by burning expensive imported gas, is the European champion of anti-nuclear sentiment. The term brainwashing may sound hyperbolic, but once one compares the actual safety record of nuclear power to how it is perceived in the Austrian public conversation, brainwashing turns out to be an understatement.
The safety case for nuclear energy is not really ambiguous, and would it not have been for the very successful operations of the anti-nuclear lobby (which, contrary to a pro-nuclear lobby, does actually exist). Nuclear power is, per unit of electricity generated, the safest energy source available to humanity. The confirmed immediate death toll from the Chernobyl disaster, the worst nuclear accident in history, is fewer than 100, with estimates of the total long-term toll ranging between 300 and 500. The Chernobyl reactor, it should be noted, was not a conventional electricity-generating plant but a dual-purpose facility that also produced weapons-grade plutonium, operating under conditions that bear no resemblance to modern reactor design.
At Fukushima, triggered by the largest earthquake in recorded Japanese history, one person died of radiation-induced lung cancer seven years after the event, and it has not been conclusively proven that Fukushima was the triggering factor. So, at best, there “maybe” has been one radiation victim in Japan. The World Health Organisation found only a very low risk of increased cancer deaths. Compare this to hydropower, widely considered a clean and safe technology: The 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in China killed an estimated 200,000 people. The breached Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine in 2023 killed at least 13. Yet no one campaigns for the abolition of hydropower.
The nuclear waste argument, the most persistent objection raised by opponents, collapses under scrutiny as well. There is no documented case of a single person being harmed by spent nuclear fuel. Not one. Spent fuel consists of solid material stored in steel and concrete casks designed to withstand hurricanes, severe floods, extreme temperatures, and missile impacts. Finland has developed a permanent deep geological repository; France reprocesses and stores its waste with a safety record that spans decades. The popular image of nuclear waste as a glowing, oozing liquid seeping into groundwater owes more to The Simpsons than to reality. As the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has confirmed, the depictions of nuclear waste in popular culture are, for the most part, pure fiction. The contrast between the actual risk and the perceived risk is so vast that it can only be explained as the product of one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern history.
This matters now more than it ever has, because electricity demand is not declining. It is surging. The International Energy Agency projects that global electricity consumption by data centres will more than double by 2030, reaching 945 terawatt hours, roughly equivalent to the entire electricity consumption of Japan. Artificial intelligence is the primary driver: AI-optimised data centres are expected to quadruple their electricity consumption by the end of the decade.
In advanced economies, data centres alone will account for more than 20 per cent of electricity demand growth. This is happening in a world where, as Václav Smil has exhaustively documented, modern civilisation already depends on four energy-intensive pillars: synthetic fertilisers, cement, plastic, and steel. I have begun to mention this in almost all my articles, lest people begin to forget it. Adding a fifth pillar in the near future, the computational infrastructure required for artificial intelligence, without expanding reliable baseload generation is not a credible strategy. Nuclear power plants operate at capacity factors above 90 per cent. Solar panels in Germany deliver electricity roughly 11 percent of the time. The arithmetic is not complicated.
Germany provides the cautionary example. Since 2000, an estimated 500 billion euros has been spent on the Energiewende, a programme that replaced coal and nuclear with wind and solar but failed to produce any significant increase in total electricity generation. Installed renewable capacity grew by 73 per cent between 2000 and 2019; actual electricity output rose by 5 per cent. Industrial electricity prices in Germany are roughly two and a half times those in the United States. In 2022, six German coal plants were among Europe’s top ten CO₂ emitters, while the country’s last three nuclear reactors were still running.
Those reactors were shut down in April 2023. As Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data has calculated, Germany could have saved thousands of lives and avoided up to 800 excess deaths per year if it had phased out coal instead of nuclear. The country that discovered nuclear fission in 1938, through the work of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, has abandoned the technology that could have saved both its industrial base and its climate targets.
The geopolitical dimension compounds the folly. Europe’s transition away from fossil fuels does not eliminate energy dependency; it redirects it. As the International Energy Agency has assessed, clean energy technologies require significantly more minerals than their fossil fuel counterparts. An onshore wind plant requires nine times the mineral resources of a gas-fired plant. China’s market share of energy transition minerals is double OPEC’s share of oil markets. Replacing dependence on Russian gas with dependence on Chinese minerals is not energy independence. It is a change of landlord. Nuclear power, by contrast, offers a path toward genuine strategic autonomy: Uranium is geographically dispersed, fuel requirements are minimal relative to output, and advanced reactor designs are becoming less fuel-intensive still.
Austria’s position is the most absurd in Europe. It operates no nuclear plants, imports nuclear electricity from its neighbours, campaigns against the technology internationally, and pays premium prices for gas to compensate for the baseload capacity it refuses to build. The anti-nuclear consensus in Austrian politics is not the product of rational risk assessment but of four decades of cultural conditioning that has made a safe, clean, and reliable energy source synonymous with existential danger in the public imagination. Whether Austria or Europe more broadly can overcome this conditioning before the combination of rising electricity demand, geopolitical instability, and industrial decline forces the question is unclear, but what is clear is that the physics of energy production will not wait for the politics to catch up.
Europe’s pre-revolutionary conditions are taking shape