Al Gore Comes Around on Nuclear Energy.
I am not here to criticize Al Gore, for whom I voted in every election in which I could do so, twice as VP, and once in a Presidential election that he may have won without being seated in office, an election, as it turns out led to the cancellation, over the long term, of the US Constitution. He certainly brought to public attention the issue of the accumulation of the dangerous (and now fairly deadly) fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere.
After being denied office, he testified before Congress, where under questioning by the anti-science pro-fossil fuel moron, James Inhofe, then Senator from Oklahoma, he was asked of his opinion of nuclear energy. I believe it was around 2002, when the average concentration of that dangerous fossil fuel waste was 373.45 ppm, around 50 ppm lower than it is today. As I recall his answer, he claimed that the use of so called "renewable energy" would be faster than nuclear at addressing the crisis.
For the record, Al Gore, negotiated with the pre-Putin Russians, a disarmament scheme that led to the importation of enriched uranium to the United States to fuel its reactors. As a result of this temporary success, many of the lives of Americans saved from air pollution, by the use of nuclear energy, can be attributed to the dismantling of nuclear weapons once aimed at our heads.
This claim, then in the realm of soothsaying, has proved to be disastrously wrong. Despite all the hype, and the expenditure of trillions of dollars around the world on so called "renewable energy," and the industrialization of vast stretches of former wilderness, the claim has been proved false by experiment. The expenditures on so called "renewable energy," the vast stretches of land destroyed, and vast mining efforts to support this foolish energy enterprise, have failed to address the collapse of the planetary atmosphere.
Happily, Al Gore reportedly is softening his "opposition" - never absolute - to nuclear energy according to the following article.
How AI is helping Al Gore warm up to nuclear power
(Free registration required.)
Why it matters: The former vice president and famous environmentalist has had an evolving perspective on nuclear. It encapsulates the tricky position the power source occupies in our broader energy and climate debate.
What he's saying: "The surge in demand for electricity is causing some reanalysis of what role nuclear might play when you have large, wealthy, consumer-facing businesses that need enormous amounts of new power," Gore said in an exclusive interview with Axios.
Later in the interview, he mused about how higher prices in recent decades halted growth in the nuclear sector.
"For a variety of reasons, it has priced itself out of the market as the market used to exist. Now the market is different," Gore said, implying that hyperscalers building data centers would be able to stomach higher prices.
"I think a lot of large users of electricity are recalculating whether or not they want to place very large, one-time bets for a huge increment of power in the form of nuclear. And I think you're going to see some resurgence of nuclear power."
The big picture: Nuclear power, one of the world's biggest sources of steady, zero-emitting electricity, has been largely stagnant over the last few decades...
...Zoom out: In 2000, as vice president, Gore said he didn't support an increased reliance on nuclear power, according to an article by the Nuclear Information and Resource Service opposed to nuclear power.
He cited nuclear' s high costs as the reason why he predicted in 2012 it would play a "limited role" in our future energy mix.
My thought bubble: I don't reference these articles to criticize his changing position, but to show how much has changed in our world such that it compels even people at Al Gore's level to rethink their positions...
The contention that nuclear energy is, or might be, "too expensive" which he claims here is a persistent myth that is nonsense, and always was nonsense, based on selective attention. It ignores life times and external costs, the biggest of the latter, being the collapse of the planetary atmosphere, which is proving to be a very expensive outcome.
The lie that so called "renewable energy" is "cheap" is based entirely on ignoring the environmental and economic costs of the required redundancy, as well as the external costs of land use and material intensity.
In the United States, with the support of his father, Senator Al Gore Sr., the United States once built more than 100 nuclear reactors while providing the cheapest electricity in the world. This was before the "arsonists complaining about forest fires" worked to destroy nuclear manufacturing infrastructure and hype risks while ignoring the risk of the planetary atmosphere being destroyed, something successfully carried out at great cost to all of humanity. His father is shown here with the President at the time, first lady at the time, and the magnificent nuclear scientist/engineer Alvin Weinberg, then Director of the Oak Ridge National Lab, which played a huge role in the development of clean nuclear power:
Al Gore Jr.'s turn around on nuclear power definitely comes in under the general rubric of "too little, too late," as does the change of heart of many people who have come around to reality.
This said, as a person who changed his mind about nuclear energy, albeit many decades before Al Gore did - doing so when Chernobyl demonstrated the worst possible case - I applaud anyone who can change his, her, or their minds in response to experimental outcomes.
(Denial of reality - now a major feature of American public life that is leading to the collapse of the United States - has not always been a feature of the political right; regrettably it has also been something of a feature among those of us on the left. We are not immune.)
I wish to note, lest there be any confusion to the matter, that the superiority of nuclear energy over all other forms of primary energy - which is a fact - does not depend on whether Al Gore agrees or disagrees with this reality. It only means that he has embraced reality. If Al Gore hated nuclear energy, it would have no bearing on this reality, any more than if he became as pronuclear as the climate scientist Jim Hansen, it would still have no bearing on this reality.
Reality does not depend on anyone's opinions of it.
Have a nice weekend.
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