“Pushing the greenies to confront their nuclear contradictions”

Concerning nuclear power’s reportedly ailing prospects in the global effort against human-caused climate disruption, two prominent columnists have offered diagnoses that challenge entrenched attitudes by inverting technopolitical stereotypes.

At the generally liberal New York Times, Eduardo Porter—with two physics degrees—charges that irrationally biased liberals “stand against” nuclear, “the only technology with an established track record of generating electricity at scale while emitting virtually no greenhouse gases.”

On the generally conservative Wall Street Journal opinion page, nonscientist Holman Jenkins—a veteran climate-consensus scoffer—charges that costs for nuclear, “our best carbon-free energy choice,” are kept prohibitively high by “a real scientific fraud,” the linear no-threshold approach to radiation risk.

Both columnists could point to recent news suggesting that nuclear power’s prospects are indeed ailing. On 18 March, the Gallup organization posted a write-up headlined “For first time, majority in U.S. oppose nuclear energy.” Above the fold on the 22 March Science Times section of the Times, an article warned that from 2029 to 2035, “three dozen of the nation’s 99 reactors, representing more than a third of the industry’s generating capacity, will face closure as their operating licenses expire.” The piece noted that nuclear plants provide 19% of US electricity.

At Scientific American, Frank von Hippel —a theoretical particle physicist who conducts nuclear policy research at Princeton University—marked the anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident with an essay that concluded, “On the scale needed to shift human energy use away from fossil fuels ... nuclear power has become a helpful but relatively marginal player. Chernobyl damaged its prospects, but it was not the only reason for the technology’s decline.”

Porter and Jenkins have sounded off about what they see as two of those reasons.

Times Economic Scene columnist Porter holds a master’s degree in quantum fields and fundamental forces from the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. His weekly column appears on the business section front page. In recent weeks, it has questioned the usefulness of strict patents on technology in global efforts against climate change and has praised the effectiveness of a carbon tax introduced by conservatives in British Columbia.

On 20 April, under the headline “Climate change bias, but on both sides,” Porter’s column began, “Are liberals impairing our ability to combat climate change?” He adduced a telling contrast: “As progressive environmentalists wring their hands at the G.O.P.'s climate change denial, there are biases on the left that stray just as far from the scientific consensus.” Tangentially he cited liberal antipathy to genetically modified organisms. But he focused on the complex dynamics of opinions about nuclear power, for example motivated reasoning —the kind of self-delusion seen when fans of opposing teams witness the same play but are motivated to judge the referee’s call in opposite ways. He didn’t use the term motivated reasoning, but he condemned that kind of thinking in the nuclear realm.

Porter stipulated that although “highlighting the left’s biases may seem like a pointless effort to apportion equal blame along ideological lines,” it’s “critical to understand how they have come into being.” He added, “It suggests how difficult it will be to overcome our scientific and technological taboos.” He concluded that “attitudes about climate change have little to do with education and people’s understanding of science” and that fixing the problem “won’t require just better science.”

Better science? In a separate but related sense, that’s exactly what Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal called for on 16 April under the headline “Climate crowd ignores a scientific fraud,” with the subhead “A defective radiation-risk standard holds back our most important low-carbon energy source.”

Jenkins contributes the WSJ‘s twice-weekly Business World column. Paradoxically, he regularly exhibits both hostility to scientists’ climate consensus and enthusiasm about technoscientific possibilities for reducing atmospheric carbon. He once quipped that if climate activists “were smart, they would put all their effort into winning government funding for battery research.” Later he wrote :

Still later he predicted that “it’s not inconceivable that nano batteries might emerge in the coming decades that will render the whole [climate] debate moot, and may even cause new worries about the consequences of a sudden drop in human carbon-dioxide output.” That June 2015 column included this: “A carbon tax allied to pro-growth tax reform, if politicians could uncorruptly produce such a thing, might be defended on cost-benefit grounds.”

Opposition to the linear no-threshold (LNT) theory of radiation risk has figured prominently for a long time in Jenkins’s surprising combination of climate-consensus hostility and cheerleading for technological advances in the struggle to reduce atmospheric carbon. Five years ago, his column aggressively supported a headline that could have been written by a pro-nuclear climate-consensus promoter: “Coal is more dangerous than nuclear: But don’t tell that to Greens getting elected to office on post-Fukushima fear-mongering.” That column probed the subtleties, perplexities, and outright unknowns surrounding the LNT model.

Is there a threshold dose below which ionizing radiation is harmless? LNT answers no—and Jenkins wants rid of LNT because he sees it as an impediment to the expansion of nuclear power. His 2 December 2015 column charged that this “unfounded dogma,” as he called it, escalates “the safety, waste storage and licensing costs of nuclear power.” For “reasons having to do with horror of nuclear war and atmospheric testing,” he wrote, “the world has surrendered since the 1950s” to LNT’s assumption “that radiation exposure is always dangerous in direct proportion to dose.” He likened LNT to claiming, preposterously, that “a bullet fired at one foot per second has 1/900th the chance of killing you as a bullet fired at 900 f.p.s.” But “change may finally be coming,” he predicted, via “a paradigm shift in how we think about nuclear risk.” To support his LNT views, Jenkins invoked Oxford University emeritus physics professor Wade Allison, UCLA nuclear medicine professor Carol S. Marcus, and toxicologist Edward J. Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Jenkins’s more recent 16 April “Climate crowd ignores a scientific fraud” column drew more than a thousand online comments. Citing James Hansen, Michael Shellenberger, and Bill McKibben as examples, Jenkins declared that “honest greens have always said nuclear power is indispensable for achieving big carbon reduction.” He lamented, “Nuclear (unlike solar) is one low-carbon energy technology that has zero chance without strong government support, yet is left out of renewables mandates.” He charged that “LNT is why nuclear plants shoulder artificially huge costs not to protect against accidents, but to protect against trivial emissions.” And he reported that “the Environmental Protection Agency and several green groups have filed defenses of LNT.”

Near the end, this pro-nuclear, anti-emissions climate scoffer wrote, “OK, science seldom fares well in high-stakes political controversies, but it’s bizarre to watch green campaigners attack anybody who questions their thinly based climate predictions, then attack anybody who questions the thinly based science that keeps down our best carbon-free energy choice.”

He finished with a sentence that could have appeared in Porter’s column: “Pushing the greenies to confront their nuclear contradictions is probably the best possible way right now of making progress on the climate conundrum.”

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.