There are three 1 Sky principles that we are asking each politician to address this November 3rd. But global warming involves many different issues, from agriculture to trade. And we're going to need to address each of them in the coming years. One of those issues is nuclear power. Here's one viewpoint from David Jay who works with Green Guerillas Against Greenwash:

Here's the good news: the harvest is beginning to come in. After years of hard work, this movement is beginning to get the political attention, investment dollars and grassroots support, necessary to address climate change head-on. Events like Step It Up are gathering together the energy that our society will need to make a truly monumental transformation: to transit-based­ cities, a renewable energy grid and a carbon-free economy.

This presents our movement with a new and interesting dilemma. Now that we're gathering up enough resources to completely transform a society, those resources are bound to attract people who aren't necessarily a part of the solution. I'm talking about greenwashers, about politicians egging for the spotlight, the occasional con artist and some folks whose hearts are in the right place but whose ideas just don't work. To be clear, I am NOT telling you to be afraid. I'm not saying that we need to implement some greenwashing terror alert level. We just need to be smart.

Take nuclear power. Nuclear lobbyists have been working overtime to make sure that they can get a nice big piece of the climate change action. Anytime you hear someone in front of a microphone or TV camera talk about "keeping nuclear on the table," you'll know that those lobbyists have been doing their job. And they are working hard. That's because the green movement that we're leading is their last, best hope for nuclear power in this country.
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Let's go back to the birth of nuclear power in this country, a spark made possible by a massive splurge of wartime spending. By 1954 it looked like we were in for a brave, new atomic future, and the american people were promised that, thanks to nuclear power "our children will enjoy electrical energy in their homes too cheap to meter." Eager to jumpstart the brave new atomic age, our government poured hundreds of millions into the nuclear industry and eagerly waited for nuclear energy to make coal-fire power plants a thing of the past.

Decades passed, but nuclear lobbyists kept coming back and asking for more money to prop up an industry rife with huge cost overruns and technical difficulties. By the 1970s, 10 short years after the first commercial nukes came online, the lack of a solution to radioactive waste disposal, as well as coordinated protests across the globe, slowed and then stopped the industry from expanding. Even government (read: taxpayer) funded disaster insurance wasn’t enough incentive to build more power plants.

Washington and Wall Street began to realize that the cry for subsidies would never stop. Nuclear power could not compete in the free market, and by the end of the 1970s, orders for new nuclear power plants stopped coming in. These days, the plants that were started back in the 60s and 70s are getting too old to operate, and for the nuclear industry to build new ones they'll need another massive infusion of cash.

Let's forget for the moment about the generalnastiness of uranium mining­, the recentaccidents and near disasters, the fact that nuclear waste is deadly for hundreds of thousands of years and is sitting around in containers that last 20, and the fact that no one has the faintest idea what to do with it. Economically, nukes don't work. While wind, solar, and other renewables are fighting to out-compete fossil fuels, nuclear energy is still mired with resource-intensive mining, bulky facilities and high risks, sucking support that should be going to clean technology and innovation.

Even if it were economically viable, nuclear plants take from 10-15 years to get from licensing to the grid. With climate change, we don't have that kind of time.

On November 3rd, we need to ask ourselves and our leaders to have the vision to create real change. That means having the wisdom to recognize that there are distractions, like nuclear, that we can't afford.

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Comments

1. Comment by BessieCase22, Apr 2nd, 2010 4:00am

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