Regrettable Division Among Those Concerned About Climate Change: Anti-nuclear and Pro-nuclear

The author of this article is 100% correct: there are two opposing factions among those of us who believe that action is necessary to deal with climate change: anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear.   His assertion that “divided we fall” is also accurate; there is no doubt that the environmentalists’ position here would be stronger if it were united on this and all other issues.

Personally, I believe that most of the rabidly anti-nuke side consists of people who don’t realize how bad coal is.  When you wrap your wits around the nature and enormous size of the destructive force represented by coal—not only in terms of greenhouse gases, but also in terms of gaseous pollutants like NOx and SOx, as well as the earth’s deadliest toxins: arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium and selenium—it’s  a lot easier to understand that perhaps we need to choose a course, at least in the short-term, that is the lesser of two evils.

Ironically, according to this article in Scientific American:

“The waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.”