Norman Foster: renewable energy has limits, while nuclear power has great potential

In the cause of combating climate change, I have been a staunch proponent of renewables such as solar and wind – not just since they have become the protagonists of the moment, but back six decades ago when they were considered to be on the fringe. Our drawings from the 1960s show how dense clusters of buildings can encourage community and privacy while preserving nature and biodiversity. At the beginning of the 1970s, we combined these principles with solar power, wind turbines, desalination, and recycling of waste to fertiliser. One such project showed the potential for regeneration of an island in the Canaries through agriculture and eco-tourism. Another demonstrated how work and leisure could be integrated into a Norwegian pine forest while still preserving the natural habitat.

At that time, pursuing a healthier environment and the reduction of energy consumption, we moved from concepts to built reality with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, which created a climate-controlled “breathing” building without the need for energy-consuming refrigeration. Even before the tide of popular opinion embraced renewables, we were active as designers to help revolutionise their design and application. For example, in 1993 we worked with the German company Enercon to show the application of an innovative direct drive from the 32-meter-diameter rotors to its generator. The elimination of a traditional gearbox avoided the issues of maintenance and noise pollution normally associated with the conventional wind turbines of the time. More than three decades ago, this single turbine was rated up to 2 megawatts to supply clean energy for 1,600 houses.

More recently, we sought to show how solar power could move from being an add-on assembly and instead be integrated as an entire facade of a building, part transparent for views and natural light and part for energy harvesting. Again, a serious attempt to innovate in the cause of furthering the development of renewables to combat climate change. So why after such a lifelong commitment through immersion in this field, coupled with an untiring advocacy for its cause, am I having serious second thoughts about what has now become a global strategy based on the renewables of wind and solar? How can I put this simply and directly?

Norman Foster

Let me start with a literary analogy in Graham Greene’s novel of 1960 A Burnt-Out Case in which, by coincidence, the central character, Querry, is an architect. The setting is a leper colony in Africa, and one interpretation of its narrative is how the reputation and character of an individual can be corroded by innuendo and defamation. This is arguably the mental equivalent of the life of the leper in the colony, where the ravages of leprosy are addressed by amputation after amputation. Finally, the person survives but, in reality, the cure has physically destroyed him.

If the patient is the planet and the cure is renewables, then I start to glimpse a future where the planet “survives” but it is dead because nature has been destroyed or seriously compromised by the cure. As humans, our connection to nature and biodiversity is central to our physical and mental health – numerous studies have quantified the importance of that relationship. The scientist Edward O. Wilson even named it “biophilia” in his 1981 book of that title. The preservation of the planet’s ecosystems (nature in other words) is at the heart of our quest to mitigate the consequences of climate change. Yet the current solution in terms of energy (which is at the heart of everything) is leading to a vast new carpeting of our land and oceans by invasive wind turbines and endless layers of impermeable solar panels. We are, however well intentioned, setting out to erode the natural world which is central to our survival.

This is not to deny the importance of wind and solar in the pursuit of clean energy. In Switzerland, there is a prize in my name for buildings that combine architectural quality with environmental performance, and it has played a major role in promoting photovoltaics – winning projects regularly exceed 300 per cent energy plus. Surely the issue is one of context, especially when the wholesale destruction of the countryside is avoidable by an equally clean but reliable source of energy in the form of nuclear fission. If we act on facts rather than emotion, then the data tells us that nuclear is the safest form of energy and is safer by a huge margin. In terms of mortality, for every single death resulting from electricity generated by nuclear, there is the equivalent of 2,600 deaths for the same amount of electricity produced by fossil fuels. Although cited as one of its drawbacks, the waste from fission is not only minimal but unlike other forms of energy, it is controllable from cradle to grave. Significantly, nobody has died from nuclear waste, unlike the estimated eight million deaths a year from air pollution, much of it caused by the burning of fossil fuels. This is the release of nearly 40 billion tons of destructive gases every year, difficult to comprehend because it is invisible.

When we think of generating energy we automatically assume mega power stations, pylons and transmission lines. We never question them. Yet it was not so long ago that we made the same assumption for telephones. There were the manual exchanges where several hundred operators (mostly women) would jiggle plugs in and out of sockets to telephones connected by wires and poles that were strung across the landscape. 

That centralised system has since dissolved into the autonomous hand-held device which is served by satellites in space. Some of those satellites, like the submarines that cruise in the depths of our oceans, are powered by tiny nuclear reactors. The Norman Foster Foundation has been working with the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems at MIT to demonstrate the application of a new generation of microreactors or nuclear batteries. Imagine a standard 6-metre shipping-container-sized reactor module, with a similar-sized interconnected power module, delivering 10 megawatts of electricity. In a basement, it could power an entire Manhattan city block or a small town. If positioned in the landscape, it would be a tiny speck compared with 174 hectares of wind turbines or 20 hectares of solar panels. 

Norman Foster

The nuclear battery is maintenance-free – every seven years the reactor core containing the fuel is replaced and no waste is stored on site. Its design is failsafe, and its fuel is low-enriched, non-weapons-grade uranium. The need for the concentrated power or energy density of nuclear, compared with solar and wind, goes beyond my plea to save nature. After two decades of popular adoption, solar power last year (2023) only provided 5.5 per cent of the world’s electricity generation. This would be worrying if the world were static, but pause to consider data centres and the dramatically increased energy demand of artificial intelligence – note that the computational power needed for sustaining the growth of AI is doubling roughly every 100 days. 

Data centres are already huge guzzlers of energy and water – one report predicts that their energy demand will have doubled in the next two years. Google has already committed to mini nuclear reactors to respond to this rise in AI. Another issue, rarely factored into future energy predictions, is the plight of 14 per cent of humanity, more than a billion people, who do not, in one form or another, have access to electricity for heating, cooling or cooking, clean water, modern sanitation or adequate shelter. Nigeria, for example, estimates that by 2050 it will need 15 times its current amount of energy to raise living standards and industrialise. If these needs are not addressed, then by 2050 it is estimated that two-thirds of the world’s urban population will suffer these conditions. Then there is the frantic rush to electrify mobility which largely ignores the reality that if most of the electricity “pumped” into the batteries of these vehicles (EVs) is from a “dirty” source, then it is still a “dirty” car. Add to this the higher embedded carbon content of its production compared with a gasoline equivalent. To put this into a wider context, if the energy needed to make the EV is clean, then it will only (emphasis on only) have to be driven more than 13,000 kilometres for it to break even in terms of its carbon footprint. However, if, more likely, the energy is sourced from fossil fuels then it will have to cover almost 130,000 kilometres before it breaches the carbon-neutral threshold and “turns green”.

In any debate on the wider implications of the green revolution, there is rarely a mention of the social and economic consequences of the mining of minerals such as lithium, copper, graphite, cobalt and nickel, which are central to battery technology and EVs. To meet world demand in the next decade, there is an estimated need to have built almost 400 new mines. More mining means more energy consumed. Add all this together and we need an abundance of clean energy beyond the capabilities of our current courses of action. We need to go beyond the bricks-and-mortar mentality of building big power stations – especially those created by Germany for dirty coal, while closing clean and safe nuclear plants and buying electricity made from nuclear power plants in France. This must be the ultimate triumph of green-party folly over factual evidence. Instead of building power stations, we should be building the factories that will produce the industrialised modular power units of the future. These can be tiny like the 10-megawatt nuclear batteries (NBs) or larger as in small modular reactors.

Rolls Royce has advanced this technology to the extent that it expects to have a demonstration unit working in 2026 delivering 470 megawatts and needing only 2.1 hectares. The technology is tried and tested, unlike the holy grail of fusion, which will hopefully succeed and transcend it. All of these routes lead to a more autonomous future of energy which prevents it from being weaponised as an instrument of war. 

Norman Foster

Autonomy would also safeguard against such incidents as the breakdown of ageing infrastructures owned by bankrupt utility providers that, literally, sparked the California wildfires of 2020 and 2021. There is also a moral imperative to increase the distribution of energy. Notwithstanding exceptions, those societies that are high consumers of energy generally enjoy lower infant mortality and higher longevity with greater sexual and political freedoms coupled with less violence. The utilities that many of us take for granted, as a privileged sector of society, have yet to be shared as a luxury for those so far denied of them.