Nuclear power key to any true climate change battle

World leaders are heading to Glasgow to come up with yet another plan to tackle climate change. Joe Biden had hoped to have a stack of climate-related legislative accomplishments to brag about. But they’re being held up and threatened in the fight over the price tag of the Build Back Better reconciliation bill.

The stakes, we’re constantly told, couldn’t be higher. If Democratic

Sen. Joe Manchin and the Republicans succeed in stripping just the proposed Clean Energy Performance Program alone it will “destroy the world,” according to Gizmodo. Biden doesn’t go that far. But at a CNN townhall he repeated his oft-cited claim that climate change poses an “existential threat to humanity.”

Such rhetoric isn’t merely wrong — humanity can survive climate change — it’s also counterproductive. The fight against climate change will be long and messy, and implying otherwise will make it longer and messier. For 30 years, activists and politicians have said before these periodic climate confabs that this is our “last chance” to act or to save the planet.

Normally, if you miss your last chance to do something — catch a flight, see a movie, etc. — you stop trying. If you think climate change should be the moral equivalent of war, then you should manage expectations like a wartime leader does. You don’t say, “We’ll lose the war if we lose this one battle” — unless it’s true.

You also don’t refuse to use your most effective weapons, at least not in a fight for the survival of humanity, without a good reason. And in this case, the best weapon in our arsenal is nuclear power. As former NASA climatologist James Hansen and his colleagues have argued, there’s “no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.”

But to quote Greta Thunberg, the Joan of

Arc of climate activism, the arguments against nuclear power boil down to it being “extremely dangerous, expensive” and “time-consuming.”

Let’s start with dangerous. For reasons of human psychology, deep-seated fear of nuclear power is socially acceptable among those who claim to “follow the science.” But just as the COVID-19 vaccines — despite what anti-vaxxers claim — haven’t killed any Americans, neither has nuclear power.

The Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the worst in American history, caused no deaths or detectable incidents of cancer. The 2011 earthquake and tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima nuclear power plant was deadly, killing up to 18,000 people. But the number of radiation-related deaths or illnesses connected to the power plant meltdown have been in the low double digits.

Indeed, if you include all factors, nuclear power is arguably the world’s safest form energy production. Then there’s the cost. It’s true: Building nuclear plants, whether with existing or new technology, is expensive. But once nuclear plants are built, the energy they produce is cheap.

None of this is to say nuclear power alone is a silver bullet, nor is it to deny that the question of how to deal with nuclear waste isn’t a thorny one (especially after President Obama rejected science in favor of politics to shut down the perfectly safe Yucca Mountain waste repository). Some old plants do need to be shut down, but they should be replaced with new, safer and less expensive ones.

But if Biden is serious about fighting climate change — and wants to show it — he should take nuclear power seriously.