Saturday, December 5, 2009

If this is true... great news for the nuclear option

Environmentalists Admit Being Wrong for 40 Years - Shackles of Nuclear Power Being Removed

Read it! A couple of pithy quotes:

"Instead, the source of the industry's happiness was The Washington Post leading Page One with an article that detailed how the environmental movement, after 40 years of bitter opposition, now concedes that nuclear power will play a role in averting further harm from global warming.

Mind you, not every environmental group has come around; but the feared and respected Natural Resources Defense Council in the United States has allowed that there is a place for nuclear power in the world's generating mix and Stephen Tindale, a former anti-nuclear activist with Friends of the Earth in the United Kingdom, has said, yes, we need nuclear.


as well as

"Nuclear was such a target of the environmental movement that it embraced the “anything but nuclear” policy with abandon. Ergo its enthusiasm for all forms of alternative energy and its spreading of the belief--still popular in left-wing circles--that wind and solar power, with a strong dose of conservation, is all that is needed.


OK, so the enviromentalists are coming around. Now what we have to do is disable the "keep-it-burning, oil is good for the economy and the environment" head-in-the-sand conservatives arguments: point out that nuclear is part of both a responsible national security portfolio and a responsible global environmental portfolio -- and we've got something. If dumbasses like Inhofe would get out of the way, if the basic inconvenient truths about global warming would get out there, and the conservatives would see the light (as IF that could ever happen, whilst they're busy stewing themselves in the juiciness of the "Climategate" kerfuffle) -- then nuclear power can help lead us to a much better 21st century than I can currently envision.

Climategate is the clarion call for the scientists involved with climate science to take the offensive; be offensive; start tossing out the idiot arguments that kept getting repeated over and over, like John Rennie just did in Scientific American did* -- and we can buckle down and get things right, with sufficient energy for the techno economy, and that includes energy generated from God's own atoms.

*Tommy Fuller, I hope you're reading this.

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