The Scourge of Nuclear Power

I recently attended a lecture about "Project Drawdown." This is an initiative not to just cap carbon emissions, but to actually reduce the amount of carbon trapped in the atmosphere in order to reverse the scourge of global climate change.

They promote 100 solutions - some of them obvious like various types of renewable energy - to some that might not seem directly related to climate change like family planning.

I purchased their book on Amazon, and am in the process of reading it.

Interestingly, one of the 100 solutions they enumerate is nuclear power. No doubt, nuclear power does not contribute to atmospheric carbon. But it does come with other environmental and societal risks. As the book states:

"One hundred solutions are featured in Drawdown. Of those, almost all are no-regrets solutions society would want to pursue regardless of their carbon impact because they have many beneficial social, environmental, and economic effects. Nuclear is a regrets solution, and regrets have already occurred at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Rocky Flats, Kyshtym, Browns Ferry, Idaho Falls, Mihama, Lucens, Fukushima Daiichi, Tokaimura, Marcoule, Windscale, Bohunice, and Church Rock. Regrets include tritium releases, abandoned uranium mines, mine-tailings pollution, spent nuclear waste disposal, illicit plutonium trafficking, thefts of fissile material, destruction of aquatic organisms sucked into cooling systems, and the need to heavily guard nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years"

I bring this up now because the New Jersey legislature is considering propping up the economically unviable nuclear industry in the state (The bill is S877). This will be a major mistake if it passes and is signed by the governor. These subsidies would be better used in the long run to promote renewable energy, a more robust grid, and yes, conservation. I'm sure that pursuing many of the 99 other initiatives in the book would be a better use of our limited resources. Please contact your legislator and tell them "no subsidies for an uneconomical and dangerous industry."

More on Project Drawdown can be found here.