Climatists for Nukes
“It is an enduring mystery to me why it is that most who insist that climate change is an existential crisis nevertheless continue to oppose what is perhaps the most obvious and scalable solution to the climate emergency: nuclear power.” — Mark Lynas, British environmentalist, co-author of The Ecomodernist Manifesto
‘C limate changes everything,” says radical green writer Naomi Klein — everything except, of course, the vehement opposition of her tribe to the only proven, reliable, and scalable source of non-carbon energy on earth. This fanaticism has confirmed many observers in their judgment that the green movement’s hatred of nuclear energy is rooted less in concerns about radiation than in fear of the possibility that it could solve a problem they need to have. That said, in recent years there has emerged a center-left movement of climate-crisis true believers who appear willing to entertain nuclear power. This movement has produced a blossoming literature nominally supporting nuclear energy as part of their solution for global warming. Most of these works have been technically illiterate or dishonest, with authors claiming that they are all for nuclear power, but only once nonexistent futuristic types of nuclear systems that would supposedly be much safer and more economical than the pressurized-water reactors (PWRs) and related designs in use today are brought to the market.
However, The Dark Horse: Nuclear Power and Climate Change , by Finnish writers Rauli Partanen and Janne Korhonen, is a noteworthy exception. It is a fine and truly competent work making the case for nuclear power now, as it really is. There’s no use of fakery to justify decades of environmentalist sabotage of the nuclear industry with specious claims that PWRs are unsafe systems imposed on the world prematurely by the maniacal U.S. Navy captain Hyman Rickover, or other such nonsense. Instead, they take no prisoners, showing how the PWR, conceived by Rickover as the power source for the submarine Nautilus in 1954 and made the basis for the commercial nuclear industry worldwide ever since, was, and remains, a very sound engineering choice. This is so because the PWR, and related types such as the Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) and the CANDU Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR), all use water both to cool the reactor and to “moderate,” or slow down, its neutrons, making them more effective as fission initiators. As a result, whenever a water-cooled and -moderated reactor loses coolant, or even experiences excessive boiling, it loses moderation and thus power, so it is physically impossible for the chain reaction to ever run away.
