Reason.com
This Thursday, Earth Day, politicians and activists will shout more about “the climate crisis.” I don’t think it’s a crisis. COVID-19, malaria, exploding debt, millions of poor children dying from diarrhea—those are genuine crises.
But global warming may become a real problem, so it’s particularly absurd that Earth Day’s activists rarely mention the form of energy that could most quickly reduce greenhouse gases: nuclear power. When France converted to nuclear, it created the world’s fastest reduction in carbon emissions.
But in America, nuclear growth came to a near halt 40 years ago, after an accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. The partial meltdown killed no one. It would probably have been forgotten had Hollywood not released a nuclear scare movie, The China Syndrome, days before.
“People saw that and freaked out,” complains Joshua Goldstein, author of A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change (with nuclear power).
One of the people still freaking out is solar activist Harvey Wasserman. “I live in terror of the next accident,” he says in my latest video. His anti-nuclear argument has basically won in most of the world. Nuclear plants are being shut down. “Why?” I ask Wasserman. No one was hurt at Three Mile Island.
For the rest of this column: https://reason.com/2021/04/21/climate-change-activists-need-to-get-serious-about-nuclear-power/