Environmental Progress (EP) was founded to save the natural environment. These goals can be achieved by mid-century — but only if we remove the obstacles to cheap, reliable and clean energy. EP achieves its mission through discovery and telling the truth. That means doing ground-breaking research and advocacy. Environmental Progress's biggest victories were saving America's largest source of clean energy — nuclear power — in Illinois, New York, Connecticut, France, South Korea, Taiwan, and New Jersey. We did so by building a humanistic environmental movement demanding energy justice for all.
The ranks of climate scientists speaking out for nuclear energy are growing. It is easy to understand why: nuclear power is the only clean, low-carbon energy sources that has scaled at the pace needed to quickly reduce carbon emissions. EP works with climate scientists to reverse the decline of clean energy as a percent of global electricity, and the absolute decline of nuclear over the last decade.
The UN IPCC, the IEA and most mainstream energy analyses have long viewed nuclear as essential to reducing emissions, but it took an open letter to environmentalists from leading climate scientists — and the film, "Pandora's Promise" — to open up the public debate.
"Closing Diablo Canyon would make it far harder to meet the state’s climate goals. Already, the percentage of electricity California generates from clean energy declined from 53 percent in 2011 to 38 percent in 2014. Without Diablo, California’s clean electricity generation would decline to 26 percent while electricity from natural gas would rise to 70 percent."
"Illinois generates more zero-emissions electricity than any other state. Most of it comes from the state’s six nuclear power plants, which produce about half of Illinois’ total generation and 90 percent of its low-carbon generation... If Clinton and Quad Cities nuclear plants were replaced by natural gas, carbon emissions would immediately increase the equivalent of adding two million cars to the road. If they were replaced by coal, the carbon emissions would more than double."
"Renewables like wind and solar and biomass will certainly play roles in a future energy economy but those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires."
Also see The Complete Case for Nuclear Power: http://environmentalprogress.org/the-complete-case-for-nuclear
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