Nuke Rockne, All American
Back before I was Bloodthirsty Liberal—when I was just liberal—I once shocked some friends by arguing that we needed to ramp up nuclear power, big time. Global warming was still a gleam in Al Gore’s eye (and a rise in his pants), the Saudis had yet to incubate the 9/11 bombers, but anybody with half a brain could see that drilling for and burning oil, coal, and gas was messy and expensive. I guess I had a bit of BTL in me all along,
So why not go nuclear, at least until cleaner technologies became practical and affordable? (This coming from someone whose mother’s arrest photo at a nuclear plant protest made the front page of the local paper when he was in high school.)
Nice to see I was ahead of the curve:
Gwyneth Cravens: I used to think we surely could do better. We could have more wind farms and solar. But I then learned about base-load energy, and that there are three forms of it: fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear. In the United States, we’re maxed out on hydro. That leaves fossil fuels and nuclear power, and most of the fossil fuel burned is coal.
In the U.S., 24,000 people a year die from coal pollution. Hundreds of thousands more people suffer from lung and heart disease directly attributable to coal pollution.
…
From a practical point of view, I think nuclear plants could be up and running and replacing fossil-fuel plants sooner than we get clean coal.
Somewhere, buried deep inside one of Richard Feynman’s delightful memoirs, is a story about a small, fail-safe nuclear reactor he designed as a a young man. He made an impassioned pitch for it as a practical approach.
Sorry, mama, but it never pays to go against Feynman.