Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Nuclear energy, in contrast, represents the ultimate in density, because, in a nuclear reaction, E = mc2: you get an immense amount of energy (proportional to the speed of light squared) from a small bit of mass. Mining the uranium for nuclear energy leaves a far smaller environmental scar than mining coal, oil, or gas, and the power plants themselves take up about one five-hundredth of the land needed by wind or solar.⁸⁰ Nuclear energy is available around the clock, and it can be plugged into power grids that provide concentrated energy where it is needed. It has a lower carbon footprint than solar, hydro, and biomass, and it’s safer than them, too. The sixty years with nuclear power have seen thirty-one deaths in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the result of extraordinary Soviet-era bungling, together with a few thousand early deaths from cancer above the 100,000 natural cancer deaths in the exposed population.⁸¹ The other two famous accidents, at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Fukushima in 2011, killed no one. Yet vast numbers of people are killed day in, day out by the pollution from burning combustibles and by accidents in mining and transporting them, none of which make headlines. Compared with nuclear power, natural gas kills 38 times as many people per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated, biomass 63 times as many, petroleum 243 times as many, and coal 387 times as many—perhaps a million deaths a year.⁸²

Nordhaus and Shellenberger summarize the calculations of an increasing number of climate scientists: “There is no credible path to reducing global carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power. It is the only low carbon technology we have today with the demonstrated capability to generate large quantities of centrally generated electric power.”⁸³ The Deep Carbonization Pathways Project, a consortium of research teams that have worked out roadmaps for countries to reduce their emissions enough to meet the 2°C target, estimates that the United States will have to get between 30 and 60 percent of its electricity from nuclear power by 2050 (1.5 to 3 times the current fraction), at the same time that it generates far more of that electricity to take over from fossil fuels in heating homes, powering vehicles, and producing steel, cement, and fertilizer.⁸⁴ In one scenario, this would require quadrupling its nuclear capacity. Similar expansions would be necessary in China, Russia, and other countries.⁸⁵

Unfortunately, the use of nuclear power has been shrinking just when it should be growing. In the United States, eleven nuclear reactors have recently been closed or are threatened with closure, which would cancel the entire carbon savings from the expanded use of solar and wind. Germany, which has relied on nuclear energy for much of its electricity, is shutting down its plants as well, increasing its carbon emissions from the coal-fired plants that replace them, and France and Japan may follow its lead.

Why are Western countries going the wrong way? Nuclear power presses a number of psychological buttons—fear of poisoning, ease of imagining catastrophes, distrust of the unfamiliar and the man-made—and the dread has been amplified by the traditional Green movement and its dubiously “progressive” supporters.⁸⁶ One commentator blames global warming on the Doobie Brothers, Bonnie Raitt, and the other rock stars whose 1979 No Nukes concert and film galvanized baby-boomer sentiment against nuclear power. (Sample lyrics of the closing anthem: “Just give me the warm power of the sun . . . But won’t you take all your atomic poison power away.”)⁸⁷ Some of the blame might go to Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, and the producers of the 1979 disaster film The China Syndrome, so named because the melted-down nuclear reactor core would supposedly sink through the Earth’s crust all the way to China, after making “an area the size of Pennsylvania” uninhabitable. In a devilish coincidence, the Three Mile Island plant in central Pennsylvania suffered its partial meltdown two weeks after the movie’s release, creating widespread panic and making the very idea of nuclear power as radioactive as its uranium fuel.

It’s often said that with climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened, but with nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.⁸⁸ As with oil tankers, cars, planes, buildings, and factories (chapter 12), engineers have learned from the accidents and near-misses and have progressively squeezed more safety out of nuclear reactors, reducing the risks of accidents and contamination far below those of fossil fuels. The advantage even extends to radioactivity, which is a natural property of the fly ash and flue gases emitted by burning coal.