It is not just economics and technology but stakeholder interests which have shaped the evolution of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology as an option with a portfolio of low-carbon technologies. We trace how over the course of the 2000s, CCS went from largely unknown to being seen as a flexible, dispatchable technology applicable to coal, gas or biomass, which could address concerns over security of supply with minimal disruption to the existing power system and business models while addressing hard-to-abate sectors including heat and process industries. Four general themes are identified as explaining why the politics of CCS has been so difficult: (i) there is no pressure for politicians or other stakeholders to seek more efficient solutions; (ii) the lack of a coherent logic or overarching industrial policy narrative for supporting CCS, except perhaps in a few isolated locations; (iii) the nature of CCS requires a much larger initial investment and greater systems integration than other low-carbon options; and (iv) changing energy industry business models, which, over the past decade, had eroded some of the factors that had worked in favour of CCS.

In this chapter, we discuss the evolution of the field of ‘ethics of nuclear energy’, regarding its past, present and future. We will first review the history of this field in the previous four decades, focusing on new and emerging challenges of nuclear energy production and waste disposal, in light of several important developments. Four of the most pressing ethical challenges will be further reviewed in the chapter. First, what is a morally ‘acceptable’ nuclear energy production method, if we consider the existing and possible new technologies? Second, provided a new tendency to consider nuclear waste disposal with several countries, what would be the new ethical and governance challenges of these multinational collaborations? Third, how should we deal with the (safety) challenges of the new geographic distribution of nuclear energy, tilting towards emerging economies with less experience with nuclear technology? Fourth, nuclear energy projects engender highly emotional controversies. Neither ignoring the emotions of the public nor taking them as a reason to prohibit or restrict a technology – we call them technocratic populist pitfalls respectively – seem to be able to guide responsible policy making.