Giving the nuke option a fair shake | CNET News.com
By Charles Cooper
Story last modified Fri Sep 28 13:43:31 PDT 2007
My late Uncle Harold never lacked for strong opinions. He served with Patton’s Third Army in Europe and life taught him not to waste time gladly suffering fools. So it was that after he became an engineer, my uncle later worked on the construction of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power reactor near San Luis Obispo, Calif. It was, no pun intended, always a hot topic of debate at family gatherings.
Since I was a “no nukes” kind of guy, there was no way I would ever trust The Man to do right by the environment. To me, Diablo Canyon and all the other nuclear energy plants going up around the country constituted an invitation to inevitable disaster. My heart was with the green movement. Back then, anti-nuclear sentiment was running high–especially after the accidents at Three Mile Island in March 1979 and Chernobyl seven years later.
“Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?” Uncle Harold said.
The overhang from the no-nukes era still casts a shadow. Any proposal to put more investment into nuclear energy always presents the risk of political suicide.
Well, that was a bit fresh. After all, I had watched The China Syndrome. OK, even though it was a movie, what if the scenario played out for real?
Uncle Harold, who was having none of it, refused to buy into any emotional arguments. He ticked off with lapidary precision a long list of benefits from nuclear energy and explained the safety mechanisms that accompanied the construction of modern plants. That was so unfair of him to use facts in an argument where it was clear that I was on the side of the angels.
Of course, I wasn’t alone in making the popular mistake of twinning opposition to the spread of nuclear weaponry with nuclear energy. As if they were forever joined at the hip. My uncle died a couple of years ago. I don’t know whether I’ve become any wiser over the years but with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I sure wish I could get a do-over with him.
Fast-forward three decades after those conversations and this country–along with the rest of the word–is locked in a noisy debate about how best to reduce fossil fuel consumption. It’s been a slow haul.
Filed under: Uncategorized
