NEI Nuclear Notes

Matt Wald The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior director of policy analysis and strategic planning at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald. Joseph J. Romm , a former assistant secretary of energy for efficiency and renewables, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress , has recently gone after James Hansen , the climatologist who issued the clarion call warning about global warming way back in 1988. Romm says that Hansen puts too much emphasis on nuclear power as a tool to reduce the carbon-loading of our atmosphere. For people worried about climate (including me) it's distressing to see the attack, because the two men agree on the fundamental point, that we need a vigorous global campaign to prevent an awful destabilization of the climate. It's a shame to see supporters of that idea falling out with each other when their key point is not yet a universally-held view. But Romm has never liked nuclear power , and perhaps we should feel...

Showtime premieres its nine-part documentary series Years of Living Dangerously tonight at 10 p.m. U.S. EDT. The series uses some of the biggest names in Hollywood to draw attention to the impacts of climate change. James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub and Arnold Schwarzenegger are on the team of executive producers, while celebrities noted for their environmental advocacy appear on camera including Don Cheadle, Harrison Ford, Matt Damon, Ian Somerhalder and Jessica Alba.  What are they hoping to accomplish with this series? Executive producer David Gelber summed it up:  The goal of Years of Living Dangerously is to galvanize a national conversation on the realities of climate change and inspire people to share their own stories and empower them to get involved in solutions. I watched the first episode, available early and for free on YouTube , and understand why the reviews are extremely positive. It is a beautiful piece from a filmmaking standpoint, but then of course ...

Richard Meserve Our readers will recall that last Fall, a group of scientists led by Dr. James Hansen of of Columbia University’s Earth Institute , issued an open letter endorsing an expansion of the use of nuclear energy in order to help combat climate change . Earlier today, Andrew Revkin of the New York Times published another open letter , this one signed by former NRC Chairman Dick Meserve, among others, applauding the actions of those four scientists and endorsing the same course of action on expanding nuclear energy. The energy needs of the world are large and growing. The one billion people that do not even have access to electricity cannot be denied the ability to improve their quality of life. Nuclear energy provides a scaleable, clean source of safe power which, with other clean energy sources, can meet the world's needs in a sustainable manner. We applaud and support the efforts of the climate scientist authors of the originally cited letter. Drs. Caldeira, Ema...

We mentioned the letter by four leading climate change scientists, James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Tom Wigley, and Ken Caldeira, on Monday [the post right below this one] and predicted it would get some pickup in the mainstream press. Prediction fulfilled: next up, this week’s lottery numbers. The stories have included some other interesting information that bolster the notion that nuclear energy can make a decided difference in mitigating climate change. Here’s the Detroit News : Stephen Ansolabehere, a Harvard professor who studies energy issues, said nuclear power is “very divisive” within the environmental movement. But he added that the letter could help educate the public about the difficult choices that climate change presents. One major environmental advocacy organization, the Natural Resources Defense Council, warned that “nuclear power is no panacea for our climate woes.” Even the nuclear energy industry doesn’t call nuclear energy a climate woe panacea. I’m pr...

Four of the world’s top climate scientists issued an open letter urging environmental groups and politicians worldwide to support nuclear energy as a primary way to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions known to contribute to global warming. James Hansen of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and formerly at NASA, Ken Caldeira , senior scientist in the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology , Kerry Emanuel , professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tom Wigley, a climate scientist at Australia’s University of Adelaide, wrote that renewable energy sources such as wind and solar energy cannot by themselves stem the threat of global warming. The letter agrees that: Renewables like wind and solar and biomass will certainly play roles in a future energy economy, but those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires. While the authors say that ...

Over the course of the history of NEI Nuclear Notes, I've assiduously avoided sharing coverage from the financial press for a variety of reasons, foremost of which is the fact that we shouldn't be in the business of providing investment advice. But this morning I'm compelled to share a clip from a U.K. publication called Financial Reporter after I read the following passage in a story by James Howard titled, " Ten reasons to go with ethical investments ." 1. They can avoid the negatives . Ethical investment ensures their money isn’t supporting companies which engage in activities they might disapprove of, such as animal testing, deforestation, arms manufacture, or nuclear energy . Now, I don't want to tell folks who have a beef with nuclear energy how to invest their own money, but I do have a real problem with anyone who tries to make the case that investing -- and by extension working in the nuclear energy industry -- isn't an ethical endeavor. In...

We've been recognizing Earth Day all day long here on all of our social media platforms , but I wanted to share one image that warmed my heart today like no other. If you pop over to the home page at Reddit , the link that's currently ranked #1 is a story that originally appeared at Scientific American on James Hansen's conclusion that the use of nuclear energy has saved millions of lives all around the world . Click to enlarge. For those of you who haven't read the paper from NASA's Godard Institute , here's the nut graph: The authors come up with the striking figure of 1.8 million as the number of lives saved by replacing fossil fuel sources with nuclear. They also estimate the saving of up to 7 million lives in the next four decades, along with substantial reductions in carbon emissions, were nuclear power to replace fossil fuel usage on a large scale. Impressive. It's indeed a happy Earth Day.