In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
Look at it this way: More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions -- or nearly 10 percent of global emissions -- of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely. I say that guardedly, of course, just days after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that his country had enriched uranium. "The nuclear technology is only for the purpose of peace and nothing else," he said. But there is widespread speculation that, even though the process is ostensibly dedicated to producing electricity, it is in fact a cover for building nuclear weapons.
And although I don't want to underestimate the very real dangers of nuclear technology in the hands of rogue states, we cannot simply ban every technology that is dangerous. That was the all-or-nothing mentality at the height of the Cold War, when anything nuclear seemed to spell doom for humanity and the environment. In 1979, Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon produced a frisson of fear with their starring roles in "The China Syndrome," a fictional evocation of nuclear disaster in which a reactor meltdown threatens a city's survival. Less than two weeks after the blockbuster film opened, a reactor core meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant sent shivers of very real anguish throughout the country.
What nobody noticed at the time, though, was that Three Mile Island was in fact a success story: The concrete containment structure did just what it was designed to do -- prevent radiation from escaping into the environment. And although the reactor itself was crippled, there was no injury or death among nuclear workers or nearby residents. Three Mile Island was the only serious accident in the history of nuclear energy generation in the United States, but it was enough to scare us away from further developing the technology: There hasn't been a nuclear plant ordered up since then.
Mr. Moore is being more than a little bit disingenuous here. In the first place, for the past 25 or 30 years, the “rogue state” in Mr. Moore’s, rhetorical gunsight has been the United States of America. Second, plenty of us have argued all along that Three Mile Island was a success story of enormous importance. No one was hurt. No one died. The technology of safety, now more than 25 years old, worked! The problem has been that the rabid Left, represented by Mr. Moore and his cohorts have been congenitally unable to separate reality from what they saw up on the big silver screen. The presence of Jane Fonda, a genuine hero to the leftwing nuts and berries movement, only compounded the problem. It wasn’t that “nobody noticed” as Mr. Moore claims, but rather that Moore and his fellow travelers were simply too obstinately obtuse to recognize the reality in front of them.
In 1979, the population of the United States was estimated by the US census bureau to be 225 million. Today it is over one third higher (300 million), with all manner of new demands for power that a growing population and a growing economy entail.
And while it is certainly gratifying that Mr. Moore has finally had his epiphany with reality, my enthusiasm for his maturation is more than a little tempered by the fact that not a single nuclear power plant has been built in the past quarter century thanks largely to Moore’s arrogance and the enormous web of legal challenges and restrictions put in place by his sanctimonious band of merry little children. Thanks a lot!
The least Moore could do is apologize to the rest of us for his short-sighted arrogance. It wouldn’t change anything, of course. But it might let us know that he really is all grown up. Finally.