People connect to possible solutions from a whole bunch of different angles. Moreover, people don’t really get science and are as a group pretty concrete in their thinking. We all know skeptics or deniers who do things or espouse actions that are or would be climate-helpful. If I talk to my financial advisor about a rapidly destabilizing climate he gets pretty edgy, but talk about reducing his commute time and the possibility of going to work on a train and he resonates with me entirely. I know of a politician who stood for hours in public denoucing the science, but he is so environmentally concerned about waste that he has spent vacations going to places that have different approaches to the problem. Because waste generates GHGs upon decomposition, he’s actually helping, or trying to help fight climate destabilization. The Bush administration mandated more employee teleworking than any other administration before it. Why? It saw employee teleworking as a security solution (i.e. greater operational continuity in the face of potential terrorist attacks).

The list goes on.

One of the reasons I have some demonstrated difficulty sleeping and thus spend part of each night trying to compose new essays on energy production methods is that I see the dangers that are already here and that face us in the future. At the same time, I have personal testimony to share about atomic fission power as an important tool in the fight against continued dependence on fossil fuel combustion, but many climate change activists – including Joe, our host here – seek to deny the fact that fission provides reliable, cost effective power without releasing much CO2 at all considering the entire fuel cycle.

I know there are cost challenges, but ANYONE who has ever been inside a nuclear power operation without being able to make a list of dozens of excessively costly practices simply was not paying attention.

It is also frequently repeated that it takes too long to build nuclear plants to make a difference, but that notion is also disputed by history – the Shippingport nuclear plant went from ground breaking to full power operation in three years. There have been other notable and more recent success stories and there are 17 applications for new plants that are already working their way through the NRC here in the US.

During a rather brief period of time from 1965-1995, despite massive organized opposition, a couple of financial crisis, and a period of both double digit inflation and interest rates, we still managed to build enough nuclear power plants in the US to displace more than 400 million tons of coal per year. We could have eliminated coal fired electrical power if we had simply kept up the already established pace instead of following people like Nader and Lovins and choosing to work hard to dismantle the entire industry.

During that same period of time, we also built about 150 submarines, and about 20 surface ships that were propelled using nuclear reactor power plants. We could have expanded that technology to the commercial shipping world, but again politics and pressure from the fossil fuel lobbies slowed down the transition.

If fission is clean enough to run inside a sealed submarine, it is clean enough to consider as a potential solution to our climate change crisis.

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast

I can only conclude that they are putting a political ideology before the welfare of the entire world. They have sold their souls.

There is still some considerable debate about how bad how soon, about which vectors are co responsible for specific events. That is not the same as saying global heating is questionable. The evidence is widespread and overwhelming.

It almost does not matter if the science is fully accepted, the risk of catastrophe is so huge that we should proceed as if it is correct. The analogy is polio… we could never say that we knew we would get polio, we just knew that taking the vaccine was a very wise way to reduce the risk. Or we don’t know that we will die of lung cancer, it is just a smarter risk to never smoke or do things that could trigger that cancer.

Aside from the logic and science, Denilaists/ Delayers are asking us to accept insane amounts of risk. I feel icky just listening to them.