Atomic Dreams
(Page 3 of 9)
January / February 2008
by Jason Mark, from Earth Island Journal
“If you’re serious about carbon emissions, you have to be serious about nuclear power,” says Craig Nesbit, a spokesman for Exelon Corp., a Chicago-based company that plans to apply for a license to build new reactors. “You can’t meet carbon goals without nuclear power. It cannot be done. There is no other technology that can do what nuclear does: produce large amounts of electricity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with no carbon emissions.”
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To help make this argument more compelling, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), an industry group, gave public relations firm Hill & Knowlton an $8 million contract to reframe the issue in the media. The PR consultants manage the NEI’s Clean and Safe Energy Coalition and enlisted former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman and Greenpeace cofounder (and corporate consultant) Patrick Moore to chair it. Hill & Knowlton helped Moore and Whitman disseminate opinion essays that ignited a torrent of other media stories.
Moore has been an especially effective voice for the nuclear industry. By highlighting his rabble-rousing days with Greenpeace, Moore has portrayed his embrace of nuclear power as a road-to-Damascus-style conversion. “Yes, I was an opponent of nuclear energy all through my Greenpeace years,” Moore says. “But when I do the math, it’s very clear to me that renewables can’t do the job themselves, and that’s why nuclear has to be part of the mix. . . . As an environmentalist, I choose nuclear.”
Moore’s pretensions to high-mindedness may be disingenuous; he is, after all, a paid flack for the nuclear industry. And—as his public support of pesticide spraying, genetically modified organisms, and logging make clear—he is a long way from his Rainbow Warrior days. Some in the environmental community have labeled Moore an “eco-Judas,” to which he responds that no one has a right “to define who is and who is not an environmentalist.”
Regardless of Moore’s green credentials, his carefully calculated stumping in favor of nuclear power has helped shift discussion on the issue. Twenty-five years ago, the buzzwords in the nuclear debate were safety and sustainability; today they are coal and carbon.
That, at least, is how Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog founder, sees it. While Moore’s support of nuclear energy seems like little more than sophisticated greenwashing, it’s more difficult to dismiss Brand’s carefully considered arguments.
“Some people have said it’s nuclear versus renewables or it’s nuclear versus conservation,” Brand says. “But it’s the [electricity] grid we are talking about, so it’s nuclear versus coal. Across the board, comparing the problems of spent nuclear fuel and spent coal fuel, it’s 1,000 or 100 to 1, in terms of nuclear being more safe. . . . Climate change is the worst thing that can happen to biodiversity. It puts the environmental movement in a different situation. It changes priorities. Suddenly, worrying about radiation 6,000 years from now goes down the list.”
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