Time for the Green Movement to Stop Demonizing Nuclear

Written by Zion Lights on December 20, 2022. Posted in Current News

The pro-nuclear movement is gaining traction despite vocal opposition

During the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt (also known as COP27), ELLE UK Contributing Editor Aja Barber couldn’t contain her exasperation at news that pro-nuclear-power demonstrators were in attendance.

“They do this every COP,” she tweeted. “It’s mortifying every time! Nuclear power remains an environment[al] justice issue for me because only the poor end up with the plant and the waste within spitting distance of their neighbourhoods.”

Barber also claimed (falsely) that people living near nuclear power plants were suffering from “real unexplained cancers,” and that those who doubted this fact were racist whites who doubted the perspective of “brown and Black people.” (Barber ignored the fact that I’m brown myself.)

As the founder of Emergency Reactor, a UK-based group of pro-nuclear activists concerned about ‘climate change’, I felt the need to call Barber out for spreading misinformation.

The people I’ve met who live near nuclear power stations are generally happy to have the jobs and other benefits that these facilities bring.

Nuclear energy generation doesn’t emit ‘greenhouse gases’ or any of the smog we commonly associate with ‘fossil-fuel’-based power plants. Modern construction and operating methods ensure that nuclear-power facilities are quiet and safe.

Yet to Barber, anyone who makes the case for nuclear power—including me—must be a “lobbyist.” Nicolas Haeringer of the anti-‘fossil-fuel’ group 350.org similarly accuses COP activists of being part of “an industrial lobby pretending to be a movement.”

It’s as if these anti-nuclear environmentalists will only take others’ concern for the planet at face value if they’ve superglued themselves to a museum, blocked traffic, or spray-painted someone’s business.

(On a separate note, I find it odd to mock activists as “cringe” simply because they express themselves with dance. For years, environmentalists have taken part in all manner of stunts to bring attention to their cause. I took part in multiple dance events when I was a member of the global environmentalist group Extinction Rebellion, including disco in the streets. To my knowledge, no one ever called us “cringe,” or accused us of being lobbyists.)

As it happens, nuclear energy is indeed related to environmental-justice concerns, though not in the way that Barber claims. Rather, it is people who live near coal-fired power plants who, as a 2018 Duke University School of Medicine summary noted, tend to be exposed to pollutants associated with “premature deaths, cardiovascular diseases, lung cancer, low birth weights, higher risk of developmental and behavioral disorders in infants and children, and higher infant mortality.”

Those who are wealthy can, of course, move away from such coal plants. But those who are poor (a condition that correlates with being a member of a racial minority group in many parts of the world) typically must stay put and endure the risk. And so, aside from helping to curb ‘climate change’, replacing coal-fired generators with nuclear power stations would also address the environmental injustices that Barber and others speak of.

The kind of misinformation that Barber is peddling is common, unfortunately. For many members of my generation, the dominant image that comes to mind in regard to nuclear power is that of Homer Simpson and the (fictional) radiation-leaking Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.

Similarly, our understanding of the industry’s owners and lobbyists was shaped by Homer’s boss on The Simpsons, the selfish and dishonest Montgomery Burns. In my earlier activism, I took it for granted that nuclear power needed to be shut down, along with ‘fossil fuels’, in favour of only renewableenergy sources such as solar, wind, and hydroelectric energy.

Yet what I eventually found was that the supposedly shadowy nuclear-power lobby didn’t really exist—at least, not on the scale of Big Oil.

If anything, in fact, policy-makers and regulators have been overly influenced by anti-nuclear activists, with little countervailing pressure being applied by industry supporters.

This is a problem because, as I’ve written previously, “according to multiple scientific bodies, nuclear energy is clean, reliable, and is needed to transition away from fossil fuels in order to combat climate change. No country in the world has been able to decarbonise its electricity sector without … nuclear energy” (except in those cases where substantial hydro energy is an available component of the local energy mix).

Even the basic typology used in environmental analysis serves to exclude nuclear options, since, as noted above, nuclear typically isn’t classified as a “renewable” source (as opposed to biofuels, which are classed as renewable but also generate enormous levels of pollution).

Even when I’ve approached nuclear industry representatives on my own initiative, I’ve found they’re curiously reluctant to promote their product. I’ve been advised not to organize pro-nuclear rallies, and even basic quotes for articles have proven hard to obtain.

Myrto Tripathi, the founder of the France-based group Voices for Nuclear, has written about the absence of lobbying from the nuclear industry, arguing that while both “fossil and renewable companies have … invested strongly to [assert] influence,” the nuclear power industry has “self‐censored, depriving itself of a major lever for its own development.”

Yet this reticence might be based on an outdated understanding of public sentiment: In the UK, at least, the latest survey data suggests that people are now ready for a discussion about how nuclear energy can be part of our future.

Forty-four percent of respondents now agree with the proposition that the government should be encouraging nuclear power generation, compared to 30 percent who take the opposite view. Just a few years ago, those numbers had been reversed.

One problem is that, as I noted in a previous Quillette article about this issue, most of the major green groups, including Greenpeace, Green parties, Friends of the Earth, and the Sierra Club, long ago enshrined opposition to nuclear power as one of their core dogmas.

They also have done their best to exacerbate fears about rare nuclear disasters, while ignoring the benefits that an increased use of nuclear power could bring—including high-quality, well-paid jobs that often come with great benefits, job security, and union support.

These are the sort of things that the progressive Left once fought for.

See more here quillette.com

Editor’s note: Zion Lights was once a radical activist; a fully paid up member of the climate cult. Then she had a sudden revelation, and began working in the nuclear industry. She was grilled a few years ago by BBC presenter Andrew Neil, whose Sunday politics show was subsequently axed by the BBC because of his climate skepticism and penchant for asking politicians questions they didn’t want to answer.

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