Are Anti-Nukes Environmentalists?

As was shown in the last two articles, nuclear energy offers many environmental benefits. In fact, the leading threat to the environment is global warming and nuclear energy is absolutely essential for minimizing it. Besides that, its environmental costs are very low, even lower than for most of the alternatives that have been suggested.

But the biggest international environmentally-oriented political organizations oppose nuclear energy and in the strongest terms possible. How can this obvious contradiction be explained? A close look at the record of these same organizations makes clear what has happened.

Please take a look at this scorecard. It shows that, for all their self-praise, these organizations have a poor record. It also includes descriptions of how they got to be so ineffective, from the viewpoints of insiders.

Besides a stubborn unwillingness to look at environmental problems that matter, anti-nukes also have in common a total misunderstanding about the ability of various energy sources to meet the world's present needs and no imagination about the world's future needs. We'll discuss the limitations of the various energy alternatives in the next article; later on we'll discuss future needs.