Nuclear Is Hot, for the Moment

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For years, the nuclear-power industry has had a complaint: Why does nobody love us?

Nuclear has been, after all, the Atlas of carbon-free energy production, keeping the world hefted on its shoulders, year after year, with thousands of megawatt-hours of electricity that required burning no fossil fuels. Even today, nuclear plants generate more zero-carbon power worldwide than wind and solar do combined.

And yet it has been (as the complaint goes) ignored, hated, marginalized. Traditional environmentalists have trashed it, opposing new construction and warning of catastrophic accidents. As recently as 2017, the Sierra Club’s Nuclear Free campaign that nuclear energy had a “big carbon footprint” because fossil fuels are used to, silicon, and other minerals in renewables. This gaslighting aggravated nuclear advocates and turned them into the professional contrarians of the energy world. ,they muttered,