Second
of three parts. Part one: Last tango for
nuclear?
Browner
signed up for the newest and shiniest effort to sell nuke plants, the year-old
Nuclear Matters, founded by electric giant Exelon in 2014.
Nuclear
Matters is run by public relations agency Sloane & Associates. Critics call
it a nuclear front group, but Sloane prefers to bill it as “starting a national
conversation on nuclear power,” and adds that other utilities, nuke builders
and suppliers have joined Exelon as sponsors.
The
group recruited several other bipartisan political heavyweights as paid
spokespeople but none that are catnip for the environmental community, where
opposition to nuclear power is the rule, not the exception.
So
when Nuclear Matters hauled in Browner as a spokesperson of its Leadership
Council last year, she was a big catch.
Browner
said she typically devotes a few hours a week to Nuclear Matters and is
compensated for her time, but neither she nor Nuclear Matters will discuss her
fee. In late January, she appeared at a Nuclear Matters event in Chicago.
Browner said her conversion to nukes is entirely based on climate change concerns, and began shortly after she left the EPA in 2001. “Climate is the biggest challenge in the world,” she said. “We cannot take nuclear off the table.”
Though
she’s enlisted in Nuclear Matters, Browner said she parts ways with industry
policy on at least one issue: she has advocated government support for wind and
solar – opposed by many of the utilities bankrolling Nuclear Matters.
Browner
was reluctant to discuss the current financial struggles of multiple nuke
plants, and acknowledged that the industry was still “trying to figure out” the
unsolved problems of nuclear waste storage.
Since
launching in Washington last April, it’s difficult to determine the impact the Nuclear Matters campaign has had. But
Browner is far from the only convert.
A Field Guide to
Nuclear Environmentalists
Opposition
to nuclear is strong among environmentalists. However, the motives to support
nuclear power vary from the pols, the techno-pragmatists, the eco-ancestors and
those desperate to counter climate change. Here’s a list of the most prominent,
in addition to Carol Browner.
James Lovelock
Now
in his mid-nineties, Lovelock has enjoyed a rock-star life as a maverick
scientist, given to great discoveries and an occasional wild overstatement. His
inventions also aided our ability to monitor ozone-destroying chemicals in the
atmosphere. As late as the mid 2000’s, he also went full-bore wild on the
prospects of a climate catastrophe, predicting that the Earth’s human
population would be mostly gone by 2100. In this desperate context, he argued,
we’d be fools to abandon any carbon-free power source, including nuclear.
Lovelock
stood on the extreme edge of the scientific community with his bleak climate
views, and eventually walked them back, affirming in 2012 that climate change
was real, but not to the “alarmist” extent he’d thought. In another interview
that year with Nature, Lovelock stuck by his nuclear guns, downplaying the
nuclear accidents at Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Stewart Brand
Stewart
Brand has been one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, an LSD-loving Grateful
Deadhead, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, and inventor of something that
vaguely preceded the computer mouse.
Ten
years ago, Brand published a manifesto called “Environmental Heresies” in which he
denounced “romantic” environmentalists and what he perceived as a reluctance to
embrace genetic engineering.
And he stuck a flag in the ground in favor of
nukes as a climate fix: “Nuclear certainly has problems – accidents, waste
storage, high construction costs, and the possible use of its fuel in weapons.
It also has advantages besides the overwhelming one of being atmospherically
clean.”
Christine Todd Whitman
New
Jersey Governor in the 1990’s and George W. Bush’s first EPA Administrator,
Whitman signed on to a paid position as co-chair of the Clean and Safe Energy
Coalition (CASE), organized by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the primary trade
association for nuclear in the U.S. Like Browner and Nuclear Matters, Whitman
acknowledges that she is compensated, but has declined to disclose how much she
or her consulting firm are paid.
At
the EPA, Whitman clashed with environmental advocates but she also clashed with
pro-business hardliners in the Bush Administration including Vice President
Dick Cheney. After resigning, she burned bridges with the Bush White House,
saying the Administration “flipped the bird” at environmental regulation.
Whitman
continues to co-chair CASE. NEI’s site lists dozens of op-eds and media
appearances by Whitman, including a defense of Georgia Power’s rate increases
to fund construction of new reactors near Augusta.
Patrick Moore
Billing
himself as a founder of Greenpeace (the organization, where I once worked,
disputes this), Pat Moore switched sides in dramatic fashion. He’s now a vocal
critic of Greenpeace and the entire environmental movement and a ubiquitous
spokesman for an array of industries with environmental image problems.
He
was a compensated pitchman for CASE and the Nuclear Energy Institute for a
decade, though neither Moore nor NEI will say for how much. He announced his
retirement in 2013, but last February, he appeared in print and radio ads
touting nuclear’s “low carbon” energy as a fix for climate change. NEI
posted the video ad on YouTube on February 24, 2014. A day
later, Moore testified before the House Science Committee that human-caused
climate change is unproven.
In
an email, Moore explained the apparent contradiction between his seeming
embrace and rejection of climate concerns on successive days. “If a government
has a climate policy that favors “low-carbon” technologies it only makes sense
to mention that as one of the benefits of nuclear,” he wrote.
Moore
added “I have been a skeptic on climate since at least 1990 when it first got
real prominence. In the mid-2000s I became convinced that the ‘warmist’
movement was more politics than science and today I think we are being duped
into spending hundreds of billions for nothing while at the same time denying
developing countries the benefits we enjoy.”
However,
in a 2006 op-ed for the Washington Post, Moore was still promoting nuclear by
sounding the climate alarm. “Nuclear energy may just be the energy source that
can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate
change.”
James Hansen
It
would be a stretch to say that James Hansen wrote the book on climate change,
but not by much. In 1988 Senate hearings, Hansen, then of NASA, laid out a
scenario of warming temperatures, rising seas, and melting icecaps that got
America’s attention, at least for a while.
His
projections bore up well over the next quarter century, though he took heat as
his climate change warnings ventured beyond science and into policy, then into
a civil disobedience arrest at the U.S. Capitol’s coal-fired power plant and at
the White House. After 46 years, he quit NASA in 2013 because “as a government
employee, you can’t testify against the government.”
In
November 2013, Hansen joined three other leading climate scientists – Ken
Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, Kerry Emanuel of MIT, and Tom Wigley of
the National Center for Atmospheric Research -- in an open letter, calling on
environmentalists to embrace “a fresh approach to nuclear power in the 21st Century.”
When
asked if he has been approached by, is affiliated with or compensated by any
industry group, Hansen, in an emailed response, said: “You’ve got to be
kidding.”
He
added that his embrace of nuclear would have happened even without a climate
crisis. “The nuclear industry has an excellent safety record, superior to any
other major industry, even when you include (Chernobyl and Fukushima).”
Hansen
said he’s received criticism for his nuclear stance that’s “much worse” than
the relentless attacks he’s received from opponents of climate action. He said
environmental leaders won’t reconsider nukes because “they are concerned that
they would lose some of their financial support.”
Ironically, that’s a
mirror-image of a frequent charge by climate deniers against Hansen and other
climate scientists.
Rajendra K. Pachauri
Pachauri
has chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nation’s
gold-standard climate science group, since 2002. In the process, the IPCC has
shared a Nobel Peace Prize, been criticized by some climate scientists for
being too conservative, and both Pachauri and the Panel have, like Hansen,
sometimes been veritable punching bags for climate deniers.
In
a discussion in Atlanta last month, Pachauri echoed IPCC’s recommendation for
nukes: “You’ve got to look at nuclear. Some countries will, some countries
won’t.” Pachauri’s native India is one that will. Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi struck a deal last month with President Obama that could open the
door for U.S. contractors to build new nuclear plants in India.
George Monbiot
British
environmental journalist Monbiot made a sharp turnaround on nuclear in 2011,
but don’t expect to see the industry featuring pull quotes from him. “Yes, I
still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see
the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are
no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence
of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the
harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been
small,” Monbiot wrote in The Guardian.
Unanswered
questions
Critics
say two crucial vulnerabilities of nukes go unaddressed in U.S pro-nuke
pitches: Unresolved questions about nuclear waste disposal, and Wall Street’s
wariness about the industry.
Nuclear
power plants currently store their waste on-site. Intended as a stop-gap method
until a national nuclear waste repository is built, on-site storage in
above-ground containers may be as good as permanent, since plans for the Yucca
Mountain repository north of Las Vegas were halted by the Obama Administration
after decades of delays.
Former
Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner and state regulator Peter Bradford sees the
finance issue as the nuclear industry’s Kryptonite. “Wall Street doesn’t want
(reactors), the utilities don’t want them,” said Bradford, who is also
Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS
is officially neutral on the use of nuclear power, but has often criticized what
it sees as safety and financial vulnerabilities in the industry.
“Trying
to solve climate change with nuclear is like trying to solve world hunger with
caviar,” he said
This
series is funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Family Foundation
Read part
one: Last Tango for Nuclear?
Next
week: From the Cold War to 1970s OPEC energy battles to Chernobyl, Fukushima
and climate change, the nuclear propaganda wars have taken some strange turns.
For
questions or feedback about this piece, contact Peter Dykstra at
pdykstra@ehn.org or Brian Bienkowski at bbienkowski@ehn.org.