Behind the histrionics and talking points framing the decades-long battle over the place of nuclear power in America’s (and the world’s) energy menu, there have long been hints of a path forward, both for dealing with existing, aging reactors and considering a new generation of technologies.

The problem has been that it’s hard to build a movement around a slogan like “Some Nukes!” in a world of yes and no.

That may be changing. Concerns about climate change driven by heat-trapping emissions from fossil fuel combustion and the substantial death toll from sooty pollution from the same sources have led to new support for nuclear power. That shift is shown convincingly in “Pandora’s Promise,” the new documentary by Robert Stone that I discussed in my previous post.

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One of five central characters in the documentary, all of whom came around to supporting nuclear energy after opposing it, is Richard Rhodes, the journalist and Pulitzer-winning historian who has centered his career on critically examining the age of the atom. Here is his “Your Dot” contribution defending his views, and the film’s conclusions:

A Welcome Debate About Nuclear Power

By Richard Rhodes A welcome debate is building about Robert Stone’s new documentary film, “Pandora’s Promise.” The film looks at the reasons why a number of environmental writers and activists have changed their minds in favor of nuclear power. I’m one of them, along with Stewart Brand (Long Now Foundation, Whole Earth Catalog), Gwyneth Cravens (Power to Save the World), Mark Lynas (The God Species, anti-GMO activist), and Michael Shellenberger (Breakthrough Institute). We all, one way or another, started out opposed to nuclear power. Each of us then learned more about it or confronted challenging conditions — global warming in particular — that led us to reconsider our opposition and change our minds. That intrigued Stone, since we all now speak and write in favor of expanding its use. Cravens and I, for example, both encountered respected scientists, men of honesty and integrity — in my case, the Nobel laureate physicists Hans Bethe and Luis Alvarez, among others — who quietly educated us in the relative risks and benefits of nuclear energy. As a result, we both concluded, independently, that the benefits greatly outweigh the risks. In exploring its subjects’ reasons for changing their minds, Stone’s film also examines the facts behind the arguments in nuclear power’s favor and the objections of those who oppose it. Based on the facts, Stone demonstrates, the objectors come up short. That hasn’t made them happy. Stone and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have already engaged in a highly spirited (to put it mildly) debate. The rest of us are being dismissed collectively as ill informed, irrelevant or worse. The intensity of the reaction probably measures the authority of Stone’s evidence. It leaves me wondering once again, though, why nuclear power, of all available energy sources, should be so passionately despised.

