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How promoting nuclear energy is the opposite of climate action
Why former climate deniers pivot to cheerleading for big nuke.
As climate denial finally dies a long overdue sad and furious death in the face of unignorably horrible extreme weather events, those who clung to it as a lynchpin of their ideological identity change their tunes. Some of them fall down a rabbit hole of continually shifting arguments that dishonestly attack every proposed solution while trying to avoid any rational discussion of the fundamental premise. Some start pretending that they never denied it in the first place and immediately use it as a false justification for the worst sort of violent fascism. A surprising fraction of them become vociferous proponents of nuclear power. “Ha!” they bloviate, “If you libtards were really serious about this climate stuff, you’d be racing to build hundreds of new nuclear power plants!” What we see in this is an only-slightly-less-defiant-of-evidence effort to combine attacking climate solutions with a desire to ‘trigger the libs’ by cheerleading for something that very definitely cannot get us where we need to be, but is pretty much tailor made for obstructing further progress.
For anyone who seriously hopes to promote nuclear energy as the solution to climate change, you really only need three things:
1. A credible logical argument for why we should ignore things like waste that is hazardous and requires special treatment for orders of magnitude longer than the lifespan of any human civilization to date, and the industry’s role in the proliferation of the deadliest weapons of mass destruction on the planet (other than, of course, weaponized willful ignorance, which arguably tops that list),
2. At least fifteen or twenty trillion dollars to pay for investment in what is far and away the most expensive form of energy known to humankind,
And most importantly, 3. A time machine so that they can get started building thousands of new reactors far enough in the past that they could come online and start producing power in the time frame that climate science indicates is absolutely necessary.
Major studies from MIT, the Commission on Energy Policy, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, for example…
