Pushing the Greenies to Confront their Nuclear Contradictions

Nuclear Power Industry

Steven T. Corneliussen reported that concerning nuclear power’s reportedly ailing prospects in the global effort against human-caused climate disruption, two prominent columnists have offered diagnoses that challenge entrenched attitudes by inverting technopolitical stereotypes. At the generally liberal New York Times, Eduardo Porter—with two physics degrees—charges that irrationally biased liberals “stand against” nuclear, “the only technology with an established track record of generating electricity at scale while emitting virtually no greenhouse gases.”

On the generally conservative Wall Street Journal opinion page, nonscientist Holman Jenkins—a veteran climate-consensus scoffer—charges that costs for nuclear, “our best carbon-free energy choice,” are kept prohibitively high by “a real scientific fraud,” the linear no-threshold approach to radiation risk. Both columnists could point to recent news suggesting that nuclear power’s prospects are indeed ailing. On 18 March, the Gallup organization posted a write-up headlined “For first time, majority in U.S. oppose nuclear energy.” Above the fold on the 22 March Science Times section of the Times, an article warned that from 2029 to 2035, “three dozen of the nation’s 99 reactors, representing more than a third of the industry’s generating capacity, will face closure as their operating licenses expire.” The piece noted that nuclear plants provide 19% of US electricity. Opposition to the linear no-threshold (LNT) theory of radiation risk has figured prominently for a long time in Jenkins’s surprising combination of climate-consensus hostility and cheerleading for technological advances in the struggle to reduce atmospheric carbon.

Five years ago, his column aggressively supported a headline that could have been written by a pro-nuclear climate-consensus promoter: “Coal is more dangerous than nuclear: But don’t tell that to Greens getting elected to office on post-Fukushima fear-mongering.” That column probed the subtleties, perplexities, and outright unknowns surrounding the LNT model. Is there a threshold dose below which ionizing radiation is harmless? LNT answers no—and Jenkins wants rid of LNT because he sees it as an impediment to the expansion of nuclear power. His 2 December 2015 column charged that this “unfounded dogma,” as he called it, escalates “the safety, waste storage and licensing costs of nuclear power.” For “reasons having to do with horror of nuclear war and atmospheric testing,” he wrote, “the world has surrendered since the 1950s” to LNT’s assumption “that radiation exposure is always dangerous in direct proportion to dose.” He likened LNT to claiming, preposterously, that “a bullet fired at one foot per second has 1/900th the chance of killing you as a bullet fired at 900 f.p.s.” But “change may finally be coming,” he predicted, via “a paradigm shift in how we think about nuclear risk.” To support his LNT views, Jenkins invoked Oxford University emeritus physics professor Wade Allison, UCLA nuclear medicine professor Carol S. Marcus, and toxicologist Edward J. Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

One one of the pro-nuclear, anti-emissions climate scoffers wrote, “OK, science seldom fares well in high-stakes political controversies, but it’s bizarre to watch green campaigners attack anybody who questions their thinly based climate predictions, then attack anybody who questions the thinly based science that keeps down our best carbon-free energy choice.” He finished with a sentence that could have appeared in Porter’s column: “Pushing the greenies to confront their nuclear contradictions is probably the best possible way right now of making progress on the climate conundrum.”