PARIS—How frustrated would you be if you had a practical solution for a climate crisis that threatens to ravage the planet and unleash social conflict that will make World War II look like child's play, but nobody would listen?

Meet the lonely advocates for nuclear power. Here at the Paris climate summit, where the 50,000 attendees, split roughly into half official representatives and half activists, the politics have split pretty much down the middle, too. You have the government folks who are dragging their heels, and you've got the climate activists who are focused on using the crisis, Shock Doctrine style, to make the world a better place. The holy word of the activists has become "renewables"—never mind that renewables are still only two percent of the international energy needs and can't possibly scale up fast enough to solve the problem.

The idea of saving the world so it can go on being just as deranged and irrational—as human—as before is at the bottom of everybody's list. Except for these 12 people gathered around a dinner table at a lovely French bistro near the Bastille. They're coming from a few press conferences and heading to a screening soon, but none of them have eaten all day and most of them haven't slept in days.

Robert Stone is fuming about Bill McKibben, founder of the world's largest climate change activist group, 350.org. A lean and articulate man, Stone is the Oscar-nominated director of a pro-nuke documentary called Pandora's Promise. The movie tracks people who were passionate anti-nuke environmentalists until they realized that climate change was a bigger problem and the only practical solution might be the very thing they'd dedicated their lives to stopping. This small cohort includes famed counterculture figures like Stewart Brand (creator of the Whole Earth Catalog) and climate scientist James Hansen, famous for his 1988 announcement to Congress about the dangers of CO2. It also incudes Stone, whose very first movie was an Earth Day-inspired anti-nuke movie.

"I have friends who have talked to McKibben privately about this, and he knows that nuclear has to be part of the solution," Stone says. "But he can't say it publicly. He says it will split the movement."

A young French woman named Myrto Tripathi—whose interesting career took her from environmental NGOs to the nuclear industry, where she's the chief salesperson for French reactors—says the environmentalists have made the French ashamed of their nuclear power, even though it means that 60 percent of French energy is carbon-free.

"But it's the thing they should be most proud of!" Stone laments.

Tripathi says it's gotten so bad, that when she went to parties and said what she did for a living, people her age would say how nice she seemed for someone who was "working for the devil." After a while, she started saying she was a florist.

The same thing happens in the States, Stone says. The big environmental lobbies are so anti-nuke that activists on the left are afraid to say anything positive about it. "It's such a bitter irony," he says. "Environmentalists are stopping progress on the greatest environmental crisis in history."

Sitting across from Stone is a sweet, enthusiastic woman named Kirsty Gogan, another longtime environmentalist who started out as a grassroots environmental activist and eventually moved to a PR job at 10 Downing Street, the British White House. Her life changed last year, when she saw a screening of Pandora's Promise, drank an expresso martini, and went home to wake her husband at 3 in the morning. "Energy for Humanity was born that day," she says.

The purpose of the group is simply to promote awareness of Pandora's Promise. It's mostly her, plus friends and these 12 disciples. The reason the film hit her so hard is because she'd also done a stint in PR for the British nuclear industry, and got a chance to see their warts. "They're arrogant," she says. "Many of them don't believe in climate change. They believe in mastery over nature and scientific and government elites—the exact opposite of what environmentalists like."

In her PR job, she'd done extensive studies on how to communicate the advantages of clean nuclear energy. She found that most people didn't even know nuclear energy is carbon-free. But she also found that people don't really evaluate the technology so much as the values it's associated with. And nuclear was fatally associated with mastery of nature and elites. Armed with this knowledge, she created a "Low Carbon Alliance" that even got endorsed by Greenpeace and got unprecedented positive attention for the nuclear industry. But the politics had gotten so polarized, and the pro-nuke insiders so anti-left and anti-renewables, she wasn't sure the nuclear industry even wanted to make alliances. "When I walked into the office that morning," she says, "I genuinely didn't know if I'd get sacked or promoted."

What she saw in Pandora's Promise was a chance to change the conversation.

Tripathi jumps in, pointing out that tonight is the anniversary of the Bhopal chemical explosion that killed as many as 16,000 people. But somehow the chemical industry avoids the kind of mystic fear nuclear power does, despite a mere handful of deaths.

"Have you seen the new Jurassic Park?" Tripathi asks. This is her latest argument for the youth. Yes, nuclear is not the greatest option in the world. Yes, Fukishima happened. But when the guys on that private dinosaur island start coming up with freaky new dinos that get out of control, the only option is asking T-Rex for help. So the bad guy from movie 1 becomes the hero of movie 3.

"T. Rex is the old evil that fixes the new evil," Tripathi says, trying out lines.

The really horrible thing, from her point of view, is that the environmentalist campaign is actually starting to create more carbon. She experienced this personally while trying to sell a reactor to Sweden, a country that is perfectly carbon-free due to an ingenious system that uses nuclear power to pump water uphill so it can be used for extra carbon-free power. Pressure from the environmentalists killed the deal. Like Germany, Sweden now wants to get off nuclear power. And how will they pump all that water? "With renewables," she says sadly. "Somehow. Like everyone."

Now they have to rush, leaving their meals half-finished and grabbing the last full bottle of wine to go. Stone has to get to a movie theater for a post-film press conference. Ten minutes later he's onstage.

"The film's been out two-and-a-half years, so I'm very happy to see a packed house," he says. "I think we should just get into it." The questions start flying, and Stone falls into a debate with a hard-core anti-nuker who says the whole problem can be solved with "renewables and efficiency." Stone lunges.

"Your scenario assumes dramatic declines in global energy use."

"Yeah," the anti-nuker says.

"But the UN projections say that global energy need will not go down. All of their estimates, even the lowest ones, are way above your assumptions."

He goes on: We're adding a new Brazil in energy use every year, and that's a good thing. Of course China and India want to raise their living standards, and we know that more education results in less population growth. It's easy to talk about reducing energy use if you're in Paris with lights and phones and flying in on a 747, not so easy if you're in a malarial village in Bangladesh. And no study has ever been made by any government or other organization that shows how renewables and efficiency will power the world in time. Sure, it would be nice, just like Naomi Klein's dream of harnessing the movement to fight climate change to solve other social problems, and Stone is all for renewables and efficiency.

"But the math doesn't add up," Stone says. "If climate change is a problem, it just seems insane to me that we don't throw everything at this."

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