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Sohn: Climate clouds gather over U.S. nukes – Part 3

Staff file photo by Doug Strickland Unit 2 senior manager of operations Tom Wallace walks inside the Unit 2 cooling tower of TVA's Watts Bar nuclear in 2015. TVA met stricter flood and disaster rules for all three of its nuclear plants as part of its effort to get the new Unit 2 of Watts Bar licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Staff file photo by Doug Strickland Unit 2 senior manager of operations Tom Wallace walks inside the Unit 2 cooling tower of TVA's Watts Bar nuclear in 2015. TVA met stricter flood and disaster rules for all three of its nuclear plants as part of its effort to get the new Unit 2 of Watts Bar licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Staff file photo by Doug Strickland Unit 2 senior manager of operations Tom Wallace walks inside the Unit 2 cooling tower of TVA's Watts Bar nuclear in 2015. TVA met stricter flood and disaster rules for all three of its nuclear plants as part of its effort to get the new Unit 2 of Watts Bar licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

By Pam Sohn 5 min read

In this time of climate change preparation – such as we have it under the Trump chaos reign – nuclear power is a two-edged sword.

Why? Because nuclear power is carbon-free power, meaning we can’t give it up. The clock is ticking on the dozen years that climate scientists say we have to stop filling our atmosphere with too much stuff or suffer the worst of the expected eventual affects of global warming.

“Today, 98 nuclear reactors provide about 20 percent of our electricity in the United States – and 60 percent of all carbon-free electricity in the United States,” according to Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and a fervent advocate of nuclear power.

On the other hand, nuclear power remains fragile, unreliable and frightening, and this is hardly the time for the Trump administration’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission to back away from every possible safeguard we can ask of our nuclear industry.

Alexander, who argues for more nuclear plants, would disagree with that “fragile, unreliable and frightening” statement, but you need look only to Fukushima, Japan, where tens of thousands of people can’t go home after a March 2011 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami led to three reactor meltdowns.