20 Leaders The Economist November 13th 2021
dried up. The country’s foreign reserves of some $9bn have been
frozen. Half a million soldiers and police have lost their jobs,
and civil servants have gone unpaid for months. Half the coun
try was living on less than $1.90 a day before the Taliban came to
power. By next summer, reckons the un, all but 3% of Afghans
will be in the same position.
In September the un held a “flash appeal” seeking over
$600m from donors, and received pledges of $1bn. But just a
third of it has arrived. The European Union promised €1bn
($1.15bn) in October. Yet €300m of that had already been commit
ted, and much of the remainder will go to Afghanistan’s neigh
bours. The wfpreckons it may need as much as $220m a month
to avert a crisis over the lean winter months.
Even if the money arrives, it is at best a sticking plaster. “No
humanitarian organisation can...replace the economy of a
country,” says Robert Mardini of the Red Cross. The economy is
atrophying. The flow of dollars into Afghanistan has been
stanched, the value of the domestic currency has plummeted
and the banking system has ground to a halt. The imfreckons
formal businesses will shrink by 30% in the next few months.Nonetheless, if aid were to resume and reserves were unfrozen,
the pain would ease.
The trouble is that this would hand billions of dollars to the
Taliban, yet to be recognised by any country as legitimate rulers
of Afghanistan. The cabinet includes figures such as Sirajuddin
Haqqani, whom the West considers a terrorist. America is ada
mant that the group must form a government that represents all
Afghans and guarantee rights for women, girls and minorities.
Those are worthy aims. Yet withholding lifesaving aid is rep
rehensible in almost any circumstances. It makes even less
sense given that the Taliban show no signs of bowing to pres
sure. The West’s demands for basic freedoms for Afghans are en
tirely justified, but allowing many of the intended beneficiaries
to starve to death is not a good way to fulfil them.
There is no choice but to work with the Taliban, as distasteful
as that is. That need not mean becoming chummy or support
ive—just realistic. The Taliban’s takeover is already terrible for
Afghans. For the West to punish them further by leaving them to
starve wouldbeas cruel as anything the zealots with guns are
likely to do.nI
n the negotiationswhich led up totheRioEarthSummitin
1992, Saudi Arabia spent a great deal of time attempting to in
sert the term “environmentally safe and sound” in front of refer
ences to “energy sources” and “energy supplies”. Given that the
oil Saudi Arabia exports in greater quantities than any other
country is now understood to be anything but environmentally
safe, this seems bizarre. At the time, though, the aim was obvi
ous to all concerned: the phrase was a way to keep nuclear power
off the Rio agenda.
The oil shocks of the 1970s had led to many countries increas
ing their nuclear efforts. In the ten years to 1992 the amount of
nuclear energy consumed worldwide had increased by 130%.
What was more, some talked of using nuclear
plants to produce not just electricity, but also
hydrogen which could then form the basis of
synthetic fuels. The Saudis may or may not have
had real concerns about the environment. But
they knew a competitor when they saw one.
Their scheming proved unnecessary. In con
trast to the oil shocks, the threat of global
warming has not served the nuclear cause well.
After peaking in 2006, the amount of nuclear energy consumed
in 2019 was just 18% higher than it had been in 1992. As a share of
global primary energy, it had fallen from 6.1% to 4.3%.
Because nuclear power is expensive in ways that show up in
profits, whereas damage to the climate is not priced into burn
ing fossil fuels, this would be unsurprising even if it were popu
lar with environmentalists—which, by and large, it is not. But it
is still too bad. The paradigmshifting drop in the cost of renew
able electricity in the past decade is central to the decarbonisa
tion pathway the world is fitfully following. But a cleanenergy
system requires redundancy and reliability in its electricity
grids that are hard to achieve with renewables alone. It will probablyalsorequirelotsofhydrogen for, say, powering aircraft and
making steel and chemicals, which reactors could provide.
Nuclear power has its drawbacks, as do all energy sources.
But when wellregulated it is reliable and, despite its reputation,
extremely safe. That is why it is foolish to close down perfectly
good nuclear power stations such as Diablo Canyon, in Califor
nia, because of little more than prejudice (see United States sec
tion). It is why some countries, most notably China, are building
out their nuclear fleets. It helps explain why others—including,
as it happens, Saudi Arabia—are getting into the game for the
first time. And it is why approaches to reducing nuclear energy’s
cost penalty are at last coming into their own.
France, which has found its newest genera
tion of huge reactors impossible to build on
time and within budget, and consequently also
hard to export, has new plans for small, modu
lar reactors (smrs) that might do better on both
counts. RollsRoyce, a British engineering com
pany, is touting a similar approach (see Britain
section). On November 4th an American com
pany, NuScale, signed a deal to sell six such
reactors to Romania at the cop26in Glasgow. Russia already has
a floating smrpower station.
Such designs can in principle be produced in factories and
shipped where they are required, keeping their costs down.
These advantages have been extolled for decades without being
realised, so caution is in order. But today’s efforts are broader
based and have real impetus. They need regulatory approaches
which, while not lax, permit their makers to learn as they build.
That will allow competing designs to prove themselves against
each other, making nuclear power, once again, a source of
innovation—and addingtotheworld’s capacity to ditch unsafe
and unsound fossil energy.nIt makes fighting climate change a lot easierThe discreet charm of nuclear power
Energy