THE SINGULAR ACHIEVEMENT OF VLAD'S WAR...:

The reality few dare to speak out loud is that each time a nuclear power plant goes offline, carbon emissions jump. And the magnitudes are not small. Recent research from the Breakthrough Institute shows that, at a minimum, premature nuclear shutdowns since 2012 have added 138 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That's close to the total yearly emissions from 37 African countries with a combined population of 455 million. At conferences the world over, negotiators from rich countries continue to press African delegates to curb their carbon emissions, then fly back to homes made cozy by coal-fired power plants that had to be brought on stream so zero-emissions nuclear plants could be taken off the grid. It's galling.

How did we get into this absurd situation?

Anti-nuclear sentiment is for the most part a holdover from a previous age of activism. In the 1960s and 70s, the original wave of boomer green campaigners cut their teeth in agitating against nuclear weapons. Cold War era fears about the bomb bled over into distrust of nuclear power, and for the first generation of green activists, protesting nuclear weapons and protesting nuclear power were two sides of the same coin: a rebellion against a science-military-industrial complex they were sure would destroy the planet. To these people, "nuclear" came to mean the opposite of "ecological." It was an aesthetic judgment as much or more than it was a political judgment, and one reached before the full scale of the climate disaster humanity was heading into had become clear.

Largely due to that early association with nuclear weapons, the fears nuclear energy generates in the public have always been out of all proportion to the actual risks it poses.

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