Earlier this year, I wrote a piece for Slate that probed the argument for nuclear power, which, in a nutshell, is based on the climate change imperative. I didn't sugarcoat the serious obstacles to a nuclear build-out. I also said that solar and wind should be ramped up. At the same time, I sided with realists who don't see renewables meeting the world's voracious energy needs. So I wrote:
Bill McKibben says we need to “do the math,” which is to take the known fossil fuel reserves that oil and gas companies expect to tap and add that to the carbon already trapped in the atmosphere. The total will end up leading to catastrophic climate change. It’s a powerfully frightening equation. But we also need to do the math for the energy equation, which should be equally frightening.
This is a central point in Pandora's Promise, the pro-nuclear documentary that ...
