The Scrambled Politics of Nuclear Power

We are living in strange times. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a conservative politician and until a few months ago, a longtime supporter of nuclear power, has vowed to shutter her nation's 17 nuclear reactors and make renewable power, such as wind and solar, Germany's dominant source of energy by 2030. Meanwhile, staunch British environmentalist George Monbiot, the popular Guardian columnist and a former nuclear foe, has recently argued in a series of forceful columns that the nuclear risks are overstated and that ramping up nuclear power is the only way to meet the world's rising energy needs and also reduce carbon emissions. Let me acknowledge that they are not equal players. Merkel is a head of a state, who has the power to make government policy. Monbiot is a pundit, who has the power to influence public debate. Still, I feel like I've entered a Bizarro World, where some of the characters, like in that hilarious Seinfeld episode, have come face to face with their opposites. How did we get here? Well, Merkel's and Monbiot's respective transformations were each set in motion by the recent tsunami in Japan and the resulting disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi complex, which still has not been resolved. They have viewed the accident through very different lenses, however. To Monbiot, an "old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami." And yet, for everything that's gone wrong, "as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation," he wrote in March. In that column, he concluded: