Part 1 of 2 Parts
     With governments worldwide turning their heads towards nuclear energy for energy security and environmental reasons, is there investor appetite to commit to the controversial power source?
     Following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power disaster in March 2011, investment interest in clean nuclear energy fell dramatically. Forty-eight gigawatts of nuclear capacity were lost and sixty five reactors were shut down or did not have their operational lifetimes extended between 2011 and 2020.
     However, the war in Ukraine and the drive to net zero carbon emissions have caused a shift in sentiment, highlighting the need for energy security.
     The uranium spot price is a barometer for investor interest in nuclear power. Since March 2020 it has risen from twenty-four dollars and sixty-six cents per pound to seventy-one dollars and sixty-four cents as of April 2024. In addition, governments and agencies across the globe have started to recognize the power of nuclear energy in stabilizing the energy triangle and achieving real-world decarbonization.

     In 2022, the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a report that said nuclear energy can “help make the energy sector’s journey away from unabated fossil fuels faster and more secure”, with nuclear power being “well placed to help decarbonize electricity supply”.
     In addition to this, at the end of COP28, the First Global Stocktake called for an acceleration of low-carbon technologies including nuclear energy. The big question is whether asset owners are turning their heads towards the energy source.
     Hortense Bioy is the head of sustainable investing research at Morningstar. She argues that the opinion of many investors towards nuclear has “changed” in recent years, with more asset owners interested in the asset class but appetite remains “relatively low”.
     Bioy explains that “As carbon has become the primary focus in efforts to stem climate change, a reassessment of the role of nuclear as a baseload power source—alongside more-volatile wind and solar clean energy—has led to a series of about-faces.”
     Gjermund Grimsby is the chief advisor for climate change at KLP which has seventy billion dollars of assets under management. At the Climate Investment Summit last week, he acknowledged the importance of nuclear energy going into the future but stated that governments must “develop the regulatory framework and cost efficiency” for pension funds like KLP to commit to the energy source.
     On the side-lines of London’s Climate Action Week, investors said that there will be an increase of investment in nuclear energy as we strive for a less carbon-intensive world. One professional mentioned a “renaissance” between the revival of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons escalation.
     Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) is the largest pension fund in the U.K. with one hundred and fifteen billion dollars of assets under management. It has not made any “decisions in respect of investing in new nuclear”.
     However, a spokesperson for USS said that it is “interested” in potentially committing to nuclear energy, “as long as we are satisfied that the risk-reward characteristics, including supportive economic regulation, represent financial value for USS and its members”.
    U.K. master trust Nest has fifteen billion dollars of assets under management. Nuclear energy is within its “investable universe” but it has no current plans to invest in the infrastructure, a spokesperson explained.
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Ambient office = 74 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 116 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 119 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 94 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 82 nanosieverts per hour

     Australia mines and exports uranium. However, so far Australia has rejected nuclear power inside its own borders.
     A great deal of the debate about nuclear power in Australia during the month since the Coalition announced its plan to install nuclear reactors in seven states has been about cost. (The Liberal–National Coalition, commonly known simply as the Coalition or the LNP, is an alliance of center-right to right-wing political parties that forms one of the two major groupings in Australian federal politics.)
     However, some things matter more to electricity users than the average price they pay for electricity. For big industrial consumers who either buy their power wholesale, or renegotiate their fixed-term price contracts frequently, it is critical that the wholesale price remains fairly steady.
     Nuclear power plants produce power at a fairly steady pace. This leads to a more steady market price. Power systems built around wind and solar produce cheaper power. However, wind and solar have more uncertain output and much greater variability in price.
     This greater variability can be reduced to some extent by adding storage such as pumped hydro and large-scale batteries. However, to the extent that it remains, uncertain prices make investments in power-hungry projects harder to justify. The bigger the uncertainty, the more investment moves to other firms, other less energy-intensive industries and other countries. This trend has been confirmed in a study of the behavior of thousands of Chinese firms between 2008 and 2018.
     The preliminary results from a project using data from Queensland were presented during Australian Energy Week last month. These results suggest that higher volatility in wholesale electricity prices reduces the share price of listed firms in the metals and mining industries. Intraday price volatility has increased by a factor of two over the past five to ten years. This has cost the companies that suffered it five percent of their share market value.
     The metals and mining industries are assessed at about twenty-seven billion dollars, meaning a five percent reduction in share price corresponds to fifty dollars each year.
     Since nuclear power can generate electricity regardless of the weather or time of day, an advantage it has is lower price volatility. This can be seen by investigating what has happened in other countries when a sizeable proportion of the nuclear capacity has been taken offline. Here are  two examples.
     The first example is from Germany which shut down three nuclear reactors on December 31, 2021. This cut Germany’s nuclear power capacity in half overnight. Shutting down the reactors pushed up price volatility by five percent to fifteen percent.
     The second example is from France. There, stress corrosion cracking was discovered in several reactors and in April 2022, it had shut down twenty-eight of France’s fifty-six reactors. This resulted in France experiencing a few extreme price spikes, which also drove up the volatility.
     In nearby southern Sweden and Poland, price volatility fell ten percent to twenty five percent during the same period.
     As wind and solar installations keep expanding across the globe, it is highly likely that electricity wholesale price volatility will climb further. If Australia continues to refuse nuclear power, it important to ask what else it can do to keep price volatility in check.

Ambient office = 105 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 81 nanosieverts per hour

Tomato from Central Market = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 75 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 67 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office = 138 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 89 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 86 nanosieverts per hour

Seranos pepper from Central Market = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 86 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office = 130 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 111 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 109 nanosieverts per hour

Red bell pepper from Central Market = 109 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 89 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 69 nanosieverts per hour

Dover Sole = 99 nanosieverts per hour