By Narayan Subramanian, Fellow at the Clean Energy Leadership Institute

Environmentalists and their critics often struggle to find common ground, but the one issue they agree on is their resistance to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy in the United States has invoked knee-jerk opposition since the Three Mile Island crisis in 1979 – a nuclear reactor meltdown that took over a decade and $1 billion to clean up. Since the accident, not a single new nuclear power plant has been built in the United States. Just as the political appetite for nuclear energy was improving, the Fukushima accident in 2011 brought renewed skepticism to the energy source. While the dangers of nuclear power are unequivocal, its ability – as part of the fuel mix – to provide base load power and meet carbon emission targets has largely been left out of the national conversation. If we are to successfully limit global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius to stave off the worst effects of climate change, nuclear power may be our best bet.

The benefits of nuclear power are unmistakable. A recent article in The Economist showed that aside from the Montreal Protocol and hydropower, nuclear power can be credited with playing the biggest role in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. On an annual basis, up to 2.2 billion tons of CO 2 equivalent emissions are averted by the use of nuclear power. This is not to mention the fact that aside from its negligible greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear power also produces virtually no particulates, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and gases such as sulfur dioxide that pose acute health effects.

Current U.S. sources of energy are broken down as such: 66% fossil fuels (39% coal, 27% natural gas), 19% nuclear, and 13% renewables (notably, solar at 0.23% and wind at 4.13%). Natural gas is expected to supplant coal as the dominant energy source, but at best, it is a transition fuel that has no place in our low-carbon future. A recent Stanford and UC Irvine study concluded that natural gas would ultimately do little to reduce emissions. Most environmentalists thus tout solar and wind as the panacea for our carbon woes.

Wind and solar energy no doubt must be part of the long-term solution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but in the meantime there are two major impediments to their deployment: reliability and scale. Solar power is inherently limited by the amount of daylight in a given day and wind power is similarly constrained by the intermittency of the wind. Without robust storage technology, these energy sources must be supplemented with other forms of energy (as they are right now with coal and natural gas) during times when their production is low. Unfortunately, the cost of energy storage technology is still too high to be paired with renewable energy sources. With regard to scale, only coal, natural gas, and nuclear can provide base load capacity for the grid. Unlike solar, wind, and other clean energy sources, nuclear technology is already tested, proven, and scalable. Take France, for example, where over 70% of the energy is supplied by nuclear power.

So why the fierce opposition to nuclear? It is quite simply an opposition guided by visceral fear more than anything else. As disastrous as the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown was, it is important to note that this would not have occurred if modern technology had been used. The Fukushima reactors required an active cooling device, which was interrupted by the tsunami that had hit. Modern reactors do not require active cooling. Furthermore, the Fukushima disaster was also the result of failed safety procedures. The backup diesel generator units were supposed to supply auxiliary power to the cooling device, but failed to do so. This would have prevented the reactor meltdown.

The conversation must transition from a debate over the merits of nuclear to one that aggressively demands the highest safety protocols to avoid catastrophe. This conversation also needs to address the question of nuclear waste storage. At the end of it all, we’re faced with a simple cost-benefit analysis: do we lose our best chance of tackling climate change or do we adopt an energy source that can meet our immediate needs while pushing us towards a low-carbon future? The choice is clear to me.