Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have both voiced opposition to nuclear energy, which is not only a bad position, but also undermines the left’s efforts to claim the mantle of climate realism, writes EricLevitz
Gotta nuke something. Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images One of the most daunting aspects of the climate crisis is the absence of any historic model for the policy response it ostensibly demands. Setting decarbonization deadlines is easy. Sketching out how a perfectly rational family of nations could theoretically hit those targets is harder, yet clearly doable.
Given the scale of this success — and the dearth of other precedents for rapid decarbonization — you might think that the French model would boast a central place in the Democratic Party’s 2020 climate debate. If so, you would be badly mistaken. France’s energy policy in the 1980s may be an exceptionally encouraging precedent, but it was also a centrally planned energy transition that involved replacing the bulk of that nation’s electricity providers with state-owned nuclear power plants.
It is extremely expensive and time-consuming to build new nuclear power plants. Thus, one can reasonably insist that the necessary funds would be better spent on other green initiatives. But there is no credible argument for decommissioning existing plants.
“The average effective doses” of radiation from Chernobyl, [The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation] concluded, “due to both external and internal exposures, received by members of the general public during 1986-2005 [were] about 30 mSv for the evacuees, 1 mSv for the residents of the former Soviet Union, and 0.3 mSv for the populations of the rest of Europe.” A sievert is a measure of radiation exposure, a millisievert is one-one-thousandth of a sievert.
This claim doesn’t scan logically. Why would the fact that nuclear is more expensive than other electricity sources mean that it would be replaced exclusively by non-carbon energy, “if it were completely up to the free market”? If natural gas is cheaper than nuclear, how can we trust the “free market” not to replace the latter with the former? And Jaczko’s claim is even more absurd when evaluated empirically: U.S.
In other contexts, Sanders’s supporters would be scandalized by the Post printing a column from an author with such a blatant conflict of interest. And most would have little trouble recognizing the thinness of Jazcko’s case were they motivated to do so. And yet, Jazcko has become the anti-nuclear leftist’s go-to source on the non-viability of nuclear energy as a climate-mitigation tool.
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