Ignoring the Fiction of a Nuclear Silver Bullet

newable, affordable energy for every community.

A growing chorus in Washington equates weaning our country off energy from killer fossil fuels to relying more heavily on new nuclear power plants. The same debates are happening in state capitals from Richmond to Raleigh, Springfield to Sacramento. This chorus distracts from the real work ahead of ensuring clean, re-

The risk of nuclear energy is an easy dividing line. To opponents, names like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima are all the evidence we need that a catastrophic event is unavoidable and unacceptable. For supporters, those events are a sign that disasters are few. Both are right – they happen infrequently, and when they do occur, they are cataclysmic.

The more compelling reasons

Guest Columnist

The day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who had announced his decision to run for President, gave a speech at the Cleveland City Club. He said that it was not a time for politics, but a time of "shame and sorrow," and he spoke on the "mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives":

"No one — no matter where he lives or what he does — can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on. … We seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire."

Guest Columnist

we should drop the silver bullet thinking about nuclear power are its cost and its reliability. Since the mid-20th century when nuclear power entered the public imagination, the belief has been that energy is "free" – start the chain reaction make electricity. It's not, and it never has been (uranium must be mined and reactor fuel is consumable). We've reached a point where renewable sources like wind and solar power are cheaper, in part because they are quicker to come on line.

Lazard, a global investment bank and financial consultancy that reports annually on the "levelized cost of energy" from various sources, found that nuclear power is two to six times more costly per megawatt hour than wind and solar (which now cost the same per megawatt hour). The capital cost of large scale solar and wind is at least eight times lower. The time to get new wind and solar into the electricity grid is at least half the time for a new nuclear plant; history shows that anyone who es-

Marian Wright Edelman

Robert Kennedy continued: "When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies — to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not

David W. Marshall

a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear — only a common desire to retreat from each other — only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force."

These words speak clearly to the moment in our nation today. At the time our dark, deep despair at Dr. King's death was leavened only by the fact that we still had Robert Kennedy. But two months after giving this speech, Robert Kennedy was shot by an assassin at the Ambassa-

Political Hypocrisy Should Come With a Political Price

When serving as then-President Donald Trump's attorney in 2018, Rudy Giuliani was a guest on the Sunday morning show "Meet the Press." During the interview with host Chuck Todd, Giuliani gave what appeared to have been a contradictory and confusing comment that explains how supporters of the former president view the subject of truth. Giuliani said that "truth isn't truth" when explaining that he would not allow special counsel Robert Mueller to rush Trump into testifying because he doesn't want investigators to trap the president in a lie. Meaning Giuliani recognizes a Trump lie when he hears one. The same can be said about former Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Unlike lying to MAGA supporters, having Trump lie to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators carried legal consequences that the Trump team sought to avoid.

On the one hand, where Giuliani brought confusion regarding truth, former FBI Director James Comey brought clarity when he responded via Twitter: "Truth exists and truth matters. Truth has always been the touchstone of our country's justice system and political life. People who lie are held accountable. If we are untethered to truth, our justice system cannot function and a society based on the rule of law dissolves," Comey tweeted. Justice, as we know, must be based on the truth of what happened. The competing viewpoints illustrate how basic truth is under attack within our political and judicial systems. The one-sided culture war has distorted the truth. Elected lawmakers and appointed judges who place power, position, and prestige over the U.S. Constitution have blurred the truth.

"Truth isn't truth" is why some timates the completion date for a new nuclear plant is wrong.

Unlike most industries that rely heavily on science and technology, the cost of building nuclear plants is rising over time. In Silicon Valley, they call it a reverse learning curve.

Supporters of nuclear power like to argue that nuclear plants are required for reliability, and that they can operate all the time. This ignores nuclear's vulnerability

JEALOUS Page 45 dor Hotel in Los Angeles. He died the next day, 55 years ago on my birthday, June 6, 1968. I never wore the beautiful bracelet my fiancé Peter Edelman, Robert Kennedy's legislative assistant, had bought at the Ambassador Hotel as a birthday present.

As I walked into St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City where Robert Kennedy's body lay in state, a weeping Charles Evers, the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar

EDELMAN Page 45 believe the pandemic was a hoax. "Truth isn't truth" is why people believe critical race theory (CRT) is taught in K-12 schools and needs to be banned. "Truth isn't truth" is why questions of ethics and conflicts of interest over Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are characterized as a witch hunt. Republican Congressman George Santos, indicted by a federal grand jury on 13 charges ranging from wire