Imposing the Non-Nuclear Option

Why do 'environmentalists' recoil in horror at the safest, cheapest, cleanest energy available to us? Maybe it's because the movement's leaders care more about killing capitalism than they do about science or economic progress.

By JEFF RHODES VP for News & Information

Few things perplex

scientists who’ve taken the time to carefully study nuclear energy more than the unwavering opposition to it from liberals in general and selfprofessed environmentalists in particular.

Where they make their mistake is in applying the metrics of logic to an ideology whose adherents care only about political clout and long ago learned to assume any pleasing form needed to advance their core objectives.

“America's liberal leaders are torn between fighting climate change and resisting nuclear power,” noted Axios climate reporter Amy Harder in 2017.

“The nuclear power industry, which provides the U.S. nearly two-thirds of its carbon-free electricity, is reaching an inflection point,” she wrote. “Several power plants are shutting down under economic duresss, which is putting

the nonNuclear Option

pressure on Congress and state legislatures to keep them open, while a new generation of advanced nuclear technologies need government backing to get off the ground.”

And yet knee-jerk opposition to all things nuclear has long been a litmus test for leftists — not in spite of, but somehow because of the almost religious fervor with which they demand we adopt draconian protections for every sub-species of worm wrigglng in every mud puddle in America.

How to explain this seeming contradiction. After all, it’s clear we cannot depend on energy from foreign countries, especially those that consider us the Great Satan.

For a few brief months during the Trump administration the U.S. became a net exporter of energy for the first time in decades. But within hours of taking the oath of office, President Biden revoked the permit on the Keystone Pipeline with no realistic alternative domestic energy source on the horizon.

Whatever Biden’s motive for doing so, it wasn’t to make energy cheaper or safer for Americans or anyone else.

Writing on howstuffworks.com, Marshall Brain explains that “a pound of highly enriched uranium Ö is equal to something on the order of a million gallons of gasoline,” and the energy equivalent to one metric ton of nuclear fuel is a few million tons of fossil fuel.

Even better, no noxious gases — in fact, no pollutants whatsoever — are emitted from nuclear power plants. And radioactivity is relatively a minor issue with nuclear power because coal-fired power plants are guilty of emitting 100 times more radiation.

Critics wail about the potential for a Chernobyllike catastrophe in the United States, but such fears only betray their ignorance.

Unlike the antiquated and hopelessly flawed Russian design, all “reactors at (U.S.) nuclear power plants are encased in steel-reinforced concrete containment structures up to four feet thick,” notes Environment & Climate News. If a horrific accident were to happen in this country, the containment building would prevent the escape of dangerous radioactivity.

And contrary to the fearmongering of environmental alarmists, nuclear power plants cannot be made into nuclear bombs. Even if terrorists attempted to attack a nuclear reactor (which can withstand the force of a commercial jetliner impact), they would have to breach the best security money can buy.

The waste issue is the most popular argument for those inexorably warring against nuclear power. But how much waste are we talking about? Compare burning millions of tons of fossil fuels with a mere 20 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste.

A sensible solution to disposing of the waste is to encapsulate it in glass, steel and lead and bury it deep in the desert.

Liberals might prefer the bird-slaughtering eyesores of 300 square miles of unreliable wind power, the amount needed to generate 1,000 megawatts of electricity. But when

The roots of environmentalists' opposition to nuclear power

The most climate-friendly reliable source of power is nuclear energy, yet environmental activists largely campaign against nuclear. Environmental Progress President Michael Shellenberger shares the fascinating history and motives of activists’ opposition in Public Utilities Fortnightly.

Shellenberger writes:

"Utilities that own nuclear power plants are in serious financial trouble. While it is tempting to blame low natural gas prices and misplaced post-Fukushima jitters, nuclear’s troubles are rooted in regulatory capture — a capture that finds its genesis in the origins of the U.S. environmental movement. This capture is now threatening to bring this climate-friendly energy source to the brink …

How then did environmentalists come to view nuclear as bad for the environment?

Starting in the mid-1960s, a handful of Sierra Club activists feared rising migration into California would destroy the state’s scenic character. They decided to attack all sources of cheap, reliable power, not just nuclear, in order to slow economic growth.

“If a doubling of the state’s population in the next 20 years is to be encouraged by providing the power resources for this growth,” wrote David Brower, who was executive director of the Sierra Club, “the state’s scenic character will be destroyed. More power plants create more industry, that in turn invites greater population density.”

A Sierra Club activist named Martin Litton, a pilot and nature photographer for Sunset magazine, led the campaign to oppose Diablo Canyon, a nuclear site Pacific Gas and Electric proposed to build on the central Californian coast in 1965.

Sierra Club member “Martin Litton hated people,” wrote a historian about the how the environmental movement turned against nuclear. “He favored a drastic reduction in population to halt encroachment on park land.”

But anti-nuclear activists had a problem: Their anti-growth message was deeply unpopular with the Californian people.

And so they quickly changed their strategy. They worked hard instead to scare the public by preying on their ignorance.

Doris Sloan, an anti-nuclear activist in northern California said, “If you’re trying to get people aroused about what is going on … you use the most emotional issue you can find.”

This included publicizing images of victims of Hiroshima and photos of babies born with birth defects.

Millions were convinced a nuclear meltdown was the same as a nuclear bomb.

How a Reactor Works

we have a safe, limitless supply of nuclear energy, why do so many people conspire against the idea?

The answer, of course, is easily unraveled when you realize that liberals are never what they say or seem to be. What unifies them first, last and always isn’t the environment, race, pacifism, income inequality or abortion.

It’s contempt for the basic institutions that made this country great and the heartfelt belief that it doesn’t deserve to prosper.

“The radical environmentalists are insisting that the only energy alternative that will save the planet is wind and solar power —the two options guaranteed to most decelerate modern industrialization and economic progress across the globe,” wrote Stephen Moore in a 2018 piece for Investor’s Business Daily. “Perhaps that is what the far Left really wants — to force mankind to slow down growth and human advancement. If that is their real agenda, then forcing businesses and families to use inferior and expensive energy is a smart strategy.”

No one recognizes the movement for what it has become with more specificity that Patrick Moore. A lifelong devotee of environmental causes and a passionate, objective scientist, Moore was among the founders of the radical group Greenpeace in the 1980s.

These days, however, he’s turned against the organization and its leadership. But not because he or his values have changed.

According to Moore, the political Left “hijacked a considerable portion of the environmental movement back in the mid-’80s and … have become very clever at using green language to cloak campaigns that have more to do with anti-industrialism, antiglobalization, anticorporate, all of those things which are basically political campaigns.”

The left’s reoccupation of environmentalismis hardly accidental. According to Columbia University Professor of History Adam Tooze, it is “driven by the urgency of anti-capitalist protest in the wake of the financial crisis and the protest movement against the lopsided austerity that followed. It is energized by the extraordinary escalation of the climate crisis, as was made clear by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018. A leftwing critique of capitalism and urgent climate activism are linked as never before.”

They are linked, in other words, less because of scientific fact than out of practical and political mutuality of purpose.

Environmental extremists cannot conceive of a world in which economic growth and Mother Nature can coexist. And as far as anticapitalists are concerned, anything that stifles progress and affluence is worth doing for its own sake.

If these activities can be cloaked in a benign-sounding affectation of concern for fresh air and clean water, their credibility will only be enhanced in certain circles.

Which brings us back to the conundrum of nuclear energy.

In fact, where liberals are concerned, there is no inconstency at all.

Like so many other ideas that would surely strengthen and improve the country, they don't reject nuclear energy because it might not work.

They reject is because they're terrified it will.ecurity money can