Do We Need To Go Nuclear On Climate Change?

Climate Change, Anthropocene, & Associated Issues

Date posted: 05/29/15

Tom Zeller admits that there is a lot of spin both pro and con, but the core argument here is that nuclear power has a key role to play in the effort to combat global warming and it is a role that increasingly cuts across social and partisan lines. President Obama proposed Clean Power Plan would provide a small credit to states that rely on nuclear power as part of their proposed emissions reduction schemes, and the nuclear industry is lobbying hard to have that credit increased something that the Administration has suggested it is considering and should do. Nuclear power is part of an all-of-the-above, diverse energy mix and provides reliable baseload power without contributing to carbon pollution, an EPA spokeswoman recently told The Hill blog. Nuclear power from current and future plants can help the U.S. meet its emissions reduction goals. That notion has become axiomatic in certain scientific and policy circles and indeed, many experts have argued that the sort of swift reduction in global carbon emissions that is needed to stabilize global warming simply cannot be achieved without an expansion of nuclear power. Such was the conclusion of a group of the most prominent climate scientists in the world, who penned an open letter to adversarial groups in 2013 imploring them to abandon their reflexive opposition to nuclear energy, for the sake of the planet. Plus, both economic and safety issues strongly favor nuclear power over wind, solar, coal, but with natural gas being cheaper at times but still not as environment-friendly as nuclear power, contrary to adversaries who point to Fukushima as a problem. But this too have been overblown because no one died and no one has exhibited radiation sickness.