Although I am not an SUV owner, I certainly fall into that category. If I had some kind of greenhouse gas budget – though it seems like that budget would ideally, and impossibly, be “0” – then any gains from my bicycle commuting would certainly be spent out, and then some, by flying. Marginal or even dramatic changes to energy efficiency were not mattering. Fast growth in small contribution energy resources like wind and solar weren’t mattering either. Taken together, they were nowhere close to canceling out the relentless year-over-year growth of greenhouse gas concentrations. (They still aren’t.) It doesn’t matter how many photos of wind turbines and solar panels appear on utility Company websites. It doesn’t matter the number of articles enthralled journalists write to proclaim the imminent arrival of the renewable energy paradise, or how many people are seduced by sunny narratives they ardently want to believe. Small changes don’t amount to much against the scale and scope of the problem.

The notion came to me that, in the interest of doing something about climate, I at least ought to think about whether nuclear energy should be re-considered.

This idea was “out of character” to the degree I was, and mostly remain, pretty much your standard-issue environmentalist. I was president of a high school club that started a city-wide recycling program in the 1970’s and was named the state’s “Outstanding Young Conservationist” the year I graduated high school. My first position out of law school was with the state’s largest environmental group. I felt at the time, and still recognize, that it was a privilege to get that position. I was able to represent the aspirations of a community of committed people I deeply respected.

So, I was part of the mainstream environmental movement. The same movement that has stoked fear of nuclear energy and done everything it could to stop nuclear energy and drive up its costs. Curiously, it wouldn’t have had to be this way. Environmentalists could have advocated for deployment of nuclear to displace coal and its emissions for optimal operation of existing plants, and accelerated development of improvements to address the technologies’ issues. But that is not how it worked out. Some roots of the movement and the evolution of its position and strategies on nuclear energy, are described (unsympathetically) here and here.

The motivations I observed seemed purer than portrayed in the links in the previous sentence, but I witnessed those sentiments as well. I also saw activists who were willing to endure large personal sacrifices in the interest of what they believed to be right. To work long hours, to get arrested, to live without much money or security. While some individuals had resources, overall, we were badly outnumbered, under-resourced and often poor. Since fear was so entwined with the choices we made on nuclear, using fear to convince others seemed more than appropriate. It seemed imperative.

My first appearance in court as a lawyer was to try to shut down a nuclear power plant by opposing replacement of its electrical generation equipment. I was “all in” with unwavering opposition to nuclear power. I worried about melt-downs and radiation and nuclear waste and proliferation.

But in 2003, eight years after the Green Plan, I could no longer ignore that the renewable energy and energy efficiency improvements we advocated were failing to accomplish much on climate. The idea that I should at least re-think the nuclear question would not go away. So, I started to restudy my many objections. It took a couple of years. This series of short essays is about what I learned in that re-study, and how it changed my mind.

“Deadly radiation.”

I believed the actual and potential radiation impacts of nuclear power plants posed potent, unacceptable hazards both to our health and, through genetic impacts, to future human generations. These shared beliefs were hardwired. They justified labeling nuclear energy “poisonous”, and they animated our determined and relentless opposition. Since this was a core issue, a lot of my initial re-study of nuclear energy focused first on radiation.