Moonage SpaceDream

Helen Caldicott decided to take on the nuclear energy industry. According to the bio in the story, she spearheaded the nuclear disarmament movement in the 80’s. A pediatrician by trade, she has spend 35 years educating people to the dangers of nuclear power. This is how she starts off her interview:

The nuclear power industry was moribund after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, but what they saw was a tremendous opportunity when global warming entered the headlines, and Al Gore did his film and all of his work.

They then decided to conduct this propaganda exercise to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, virtually telling mistruths, that nuclear power is free of emissions and green and clean. Nuclear power’s main emission, of course, is massive quantities of radioactive waste that pollute food chains and cause cancer for hundreds of millions of years.

Per the norm, takes a hand full of facts and throws in a LOT of scary words like “lies”, “witches cauldron”, and states assertively that Europe would be uninhabitable if a war broke out because every reactor would meltdown if attacked. It just goes on and on. Nuclear energy is scary, scary, scary, and anyone that thinks otherwise is influenced by the nuclear propaganda machine.

Then she offers her alternative, the “Roadmap for a Zero-CO₂ Energy Future“. She cites that Silicon Valley, Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, and Democrats support it. Here’s the link to the Roadmap for a Zero-CO₂ Energy Future. They talk about what they’re going to do, but at this time, there is NO Roadmap for a Zero-CO2 Energy Future. She has no answer. No Alternative. And all of this is on a page called Nuclear Policy Research Institute. Which begs the question, if she’s completely anti-nuclear, and sees a future with no nuclear energy, why does she call it the Nuclear Policy Research Institute?

I got a suggestion for Ms. Caldicott, we need alternatives to fossil fuels NOW. We should have been looking at alternatives to fossil fuels in the 80’s when she was destroying nuclear energy and not offering any viable alternatives. Because of her actions, we are in a hell of a crunch NOW. Sure, being green is great, and is the ultimate future of energy, but because of people like Caldicott, we’re in a jam NOW. In the 80’s, she killed off a non-fossil-fuel source of energy and gave us NOTHING. Now, 20 years later, she’s wanting to kill of a non-fossil-fuel source of energy and is offering us NOTHING.

So, excuse me if I suggest that the people that got us in this mess be ignored and we listen to people with some answers. Nuclear energy may not be the answer. But, at this time, thanks to Ms. Caldicott’s efforts in the past, we don’t have any other ones that can provide the amount of energy we need NOW to get us off coal and especially petroleum.

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