“This summer should serve as another wake-up call to the climate crisis. It’s here and nuclear power is neither going to help to mitigate it or protect us from its impacts.”
By Sam Mason
The European Copernicus climate change service has confirmed that June and July were the hottest period on record across western Europe. Extreme heat, record excess summer deaths, drought and an intensification of wildfires, the new ‘normal’ of the climate crisis arrived in full force this summer.
In debates on energy security, nuclear power is often cited as essential to both energy security and decarbonisation. However, as we are increasingly seeing, nuclear is itself vulnerable to climate change.
But it didn’t take a summer of relentless heatwaves to tell us this. Dr Paul Dorfman at the University of Sussex has consistently been highlighting that nuclear power is on the frontline of climate change as it threatens its infrastructure. Sizewell B and the construction site of Sizewell C in Suffolk, for example, are located on one of the fastest eroding coastlines in Europe and will be subject to storm surges and floods.
And as we now know, it is also at risk from wildfires.
The blaze on Dunwich Heath in Suffolk was within a couple of miles of the nuclear power station. Thankfully, the winds steered it away, but the reality is that hotter and drier summers are making wildfires, based on research following the 2022 record temperatures, six times more likely.
Another argument for nuclear power is that it’s essential as a baseload energy source to fill in for renewable energy when the sun doesn’t shine, or the wind doesn’t blow. Arguments that are failing to stack up, and indeed, proving the opposite in the face of a rapidly warming world.
France, a country where nuclear power provides around 70% of its energy, is reported to have seen a dip of around 20% in power production in early August as a result of the continued heatwaves. Such disruptions aren’t new, but are increasingly apparent as summers have become hotter, and this year was on such a scale to have been described as unprecedented.
A multiple of factors has been the cause: jellyfish infestations in the water intakes of coastal plants – themselves a result of warming seas, low river levels, and river water temperatures exceeding regulatory thresholds. The latter means the heat of the water being expelled back into rivers is a threat to local ecology and biodiversity.
According to analysis by Carbon Brief, around 60 of the world’s 440 reactors use ‘once-through river cooling’ and are the most the most impacted by heatwaves and droughts.
In Hungary and Romania, nuclear power plants reliant on the Danube for cooling had to be shut down or saw their output reduced due to drought and low river levels. The severity of the situation in the Danube was such that the Romanian navy was brought in to undertake ‘controlled blasts’ to divert the river flow to one of the two reactors, which was shut down.
Such constraints impact across the energy system, both within countries reliant on nuclear power and those who import this energy. And happening at a time when the extreme heat is placing greater pressure on demand as use of air conditioning and refrigeration increases.
With the global dash to establish AI and data centres as a new growth ‘cash cow’, governments are looking to increase their nuclear capacity, whether with conventional reactors or Small Modular Reactors. The Republic of Ireland, which has banned nuclear power since 1999, has reopened this debate as a response to its burgeoning data centre energy needs.
As if there were not reasons enough to question the use of nuclear power, in a warming world and with climate change impacts intensifying, it is beyond time to stop and reinvest all efforts into a renewable energy transition. This summer should serve as another wake-up call to the climate crisis. It’s here, and nuclear power is neither going to help to mitigate it nor protect us from its impacts.
- Sam Mason is a CND council member. You can follow the CND on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X.
- This article was originally published by CND on 7 September 2026.
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