Nuclear Power: High Costs, Waste Issues, and Grid Collapse

Nuclear Power Isn't Going Away: The Data Fueling the Conflict

Spain needs electricity, but the grid is saturated. Nine out of ten requests for connections to housing, industry, or data centers are rejected; meanwhile, the country debates shutting down or extending the life of its nuclear plants. This contradiction has a high price tag. Stances on atomic energy have been entrenched for decades, but economic analysis reveals a scenario more uncomfortable than any slogan.

The Silent Collapse of the Electrical Grid

Spain's electrical grid is at its limit. Requests for access from new industrial developments, housing, or data centers hit a wall: nine out of ten are denied. Industry has nowhere to connect, and renewable generation projects, with their intermittent output, cannot ensure system stability alone when there is no sun or wind. Nuclear power, however, provides synchronous energy, which maintains stable grid frequency, making its disappearance not merely an ideological issue.

Here lies the first paradox. Those demanding the closure of existing plants face a physical calendar: plant lifespans extend until cracks appear in the reactor vessel. In the case of Almaraz, the extension until 2030 has become a political decision fraught with risk.

Waste: Two Olympic Pools and a Decades-Long Problem

The most powerful criticism against nuclear power is radioactive legacy. France accumulates two million cubic meters of radioactive waste, a figure that seems daunting until broken down. High-level materials, requiring millennia of isolation, represent just 0.2% of the total: less than 4,000 cubic meters after over 50 years of operation, a volume smaller than two Olympic pools. The rest are tools, clothing, and debris with such low radioactivity they are stored on the surface.

The problem is that this 0.2% requires solutions for 100,000 years. While France buries its plan in an underground repository of 80,000 cubic meters, Finland already operates Onkalo, 450 meters deep in granite, without incidents. Waste management is primarily a matter of political will and intergenerational cost. The "not in my term" argument weighs more than physics.

The Cost of a New Reactor: €10 Billion and a Decade

Building a one-gigawatt nuclear plant costs around €10 billion and takes at least ten years. It is capital no private investor wants to immobilize without public guarantees, which is why no private company has built a single plant without state coercion. Meanwhile, renewables become cheaper and deploy faster, though they suffer from the storage Achilles' heel: without large-scale batteries, when the wind doesn't blow or it's night, the balance doesn't add up.

With these numbers on the table, the economic conclusion sounds almost cynical: Spain won't build more nuclear plants, not due to environmentalism, but because they aren't profitable without state involvement. What will happen is stretching the useful life of existing plants, which generate cheap and stabilizing electricity, until the reactor fails. Small modular reactors and thorium designs loom on the horizon, still experimental, closer to the lab than to operational reality.

Background Noise: Gazprom, Greenpeace, and the Cultural Battle

At the other end of the spectrum are those who argue that rejection of nuclear power is induced rather than economic. According to this thesis, Germany's exit from atomic energy was financed by Gazprom to tie Europe to Russian gas. Greenpeace appears in the same paragraph, though no invoices prove it. As a curiosity, some summarize the entire confrontation with a long-circulating witticism: "Atomic energy is fascist."

The Next Demand Crisis

It is foreseeable that Spain will extend the life of Almaraz and other existing plants, and that no government will dare bury the bill for a new reactor. The unresolved question is how much this indecision will cost during the next demand crisis, when industry waits months for a plug that never comes. Nuclear power isn't a panacea; nor is it the demon portrayed. It is simply an engineering and political value problem that this country refuses to fully resolve.