During an interview with NPR yesterday, Julian Castro (who is still running for president for some mysterious reason) described his energy plan. As part of it, he declared that we need to phase out nuclear energy, along with getting rid of coal, oil, natural gas and anything else involving any carbon emissions. People who have actually studied this issue already know that nuclear power is crucial is you’re really serious about doing away with fossil fuels, so even the hosts on NPR were skeptical of Castro’s plan. (Free Beacon)

The former Obama administration official acknowledged that nuclear energy is preferable to carbon-based fuels, such as oil and coal, but said his environmental policies would center almost entirely on wind and solar energy. NPR host Lulu Garcia-Navarro voiced concerns that green energy “cannot in the short term make up for the traditional sources of energy.” “We need to move away from coal, oil, and gas and phase out nuclear,” Castro said. “Nuclear is definitely preferable when it comes to carbon emissions versus those other three and the way that I think about it is, sort of the worst-first approach to working on immediately getting the worst of the types of energy that produces carbon emissions out first.” Castro’s plan would put the United States on a path to 100 percent clean renewable energy in the electricity sector within 15 years.

This is yet another example of an unserious candidate with a bunch of equally unserious plans designed to rev up the far left. If you look at the details of what Castro would like to do, he’s saying that the entire country needs to be 100% reliant on only “clean renewable energy” (meaning basically just wind and solar) in fifteen years. Anyone who works in the industry, whether they are on the left or the right, will tell you that this is flatly impossible and would leave us exposed to massive failures of the electrical grid.

Also, if Castro would listen to even some of the most adamant client scientists warning about global warming he would know that nuclear energy is the safest form of energy we have. In addition to that, it produces zero carbon emissions.

Hans Blix (not exactly a right-wing idealogue) recently warned climate alarmists that if you want to go green you’re going to need to start building a lot more nuclear power plants. The problem is that our current regulatory structure has made it so cripplingly expensive to build a new nuclear plant in the United States that the energy industry has basically given up on trying. Meanwhile, nuclear energy is flourishing in Europe, accounting for increasingly larger percentages of the energy they put on the grid.

We could change that situation here at home, but not if we keep electing people in the mold of Castro or Bernie Sanders (who has also called to phase out nuclear). These people have spent far too long watching reruns of The China Syndrome and not studying the actual science underlying the issue. They may be winning over some voters on the far left, but they’re promising to essentially cripple the country. If they want to freeze to death in the dark, that’s their prerogative. But don’t take the rest of us down with you.