Atomic Dreams
(Page 7 of 9)
January / February 2008
by Jason Mark, from Earth Island Journal
“The issue is off the radar for a lot of people,” says Tyler Dawson, a student at Ohio University and an executive committee member of the Sierra Student Coalition. “A lot of students, if they don’t understand how nuclear works, at least know there is a danger to it. But I’ve heard from a lot of students who say, ‘You know, Europe runs a lot of nuclear.’ They have heard that nuclear power doesn’t produce any greenhouse gas emissions.”
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When he’s not studying for a degree in political science, Dawson is busy campaigning against the dirty practices of the coal industry. Until recently, nuclear politics did not touch his activism. Dawson was born in 1986, the same year as the Chernobyl disaster.
“I work with a lot of young people, and they don’t have the same kind of experience and memory of working with nuclear power,” says Matt Reitman, 24, a Syracuse University graduate now working for the Energy Justice Network. “They have never formed an opinion on the issue because they have never been confronted with the issue. So now they are saying, ‘I want to learn about it, I want to talk about it and hear the pros and cons.’ ”
Climate activists’ nuclear curiosity presents a challenge to the country’s environmental leadership. Thanks to its PR attack, the nuclear industry appears to have the rhetorical advantage for now. If the debate is carbon-heavy coal versus carbon-light nuclear, the atomic argument will win. The task facing the environmental movement, then, is to start a different discussion. Environmental groups need to shift the conversation away from an argument of specific carbon reduction strategies and toward a broader discussion about long-term ecological sustainability. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, that won’t be easy.
Embedded in the energy debate is a deeper discussion of expectations and ecology. That is, what kind of world do we want to live in?
The argument over nuclear power reveals a long-standing tension in the environmental movement between those who say there are technical fixes to the greenhouse gas challenge and others who believe that we need a wholesale restructuring of society if we are to avoid global meltdown. To embrace a new round of nuclear reactor construction is to say that we can have our climate and eat all the energy we want, too; it is, in some ways, maintenance of the status quo. To oppose nuclear power is to suggest that we need to reform the ways in which we live, for if we can find a way to create lifestyles that don’t demand as much electricity, then the nuclear question is moot.
The notion of reducing the United States’ energy usage is laughable to those in the energy industry. “We have never seen a decrease in electricity use,” Exelon’s Nesbit says. “To think otherwise is just putting your head in the sand. We can slow the growth of demand, but we are not going to reverse it.”
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