Rebecca Solnit 

4 March 2022

Hey all us antinuclear people have been saying since at least the 1970s what about war, terrorism, and accidents? The Russian army, under the direction of a mad dictator, now controls both Chernobyl and Europe’s largest nuclear power plant and took control of each in a reckless way, potentially endangering not just Ukraine but Europe and beyond. Which is to say we are now seeing one of the many risks of nuclear power.

p.s. Takes too long to build a nuke plant to address the climate crisis, which needs us to move away from fossil fuel fast. And it takes a lot of fossil fuel to get the uranium–usually mined on indigenous land, with horrific effects to land and people– and to build the plant, which will then need a huge and reliable supply of cool water for its operating life. Renewables are cheaper, faster, safer, and among the unsung heroes of our time are the engineers constantly finding ways to make them cheaper, more effective, more adaptive, finding new ways to address storage, new materials for batteries, etc. And renewables don’t leave radioactive waste that’s dangerous for tens of thousands of years.