After this initial view of two contrasting European programs, “A Bright Future” is largely devoted to debunking the many attacks nuclear power has weathered over the years. “The antinuclear movement has progressed through reasons to oppose nuclear power,” the authors write, “one after another.” It was too dangerous. Then it would lead to weapons proliferation. Then it was uneconomical, an argument still made, one the authors debunk when it comes to countries like Sweden and South Korea that haven’t experienced the strangulating effect of heavy government regulation and antinuclear litigation.

Then it was unnecessary because it was argued that renewables could do the job. “But in every case where nuclear power was shut down, renewables have not filled the gap and CO 2 emissions have gone up, whereas in places such as Ontario that expanded nuclear power, emissions went down.”

A final claim, that nuclear power is politically infeasible, “is just a self-fulfilling prophecy, and we should not be so quick to write off the most practical solution for humanity’s most serious problem. … Politics have a way of catching up with necessity.”

I happen to be in sympathy with these authors’ view that nuclear power must be a major part of the worldwide campaign to limit and reverse global warming. Their discussion omits an important historical component, however, one that has subverted logical argument.

Historically, the antinuclear movement didn’t emerge from environmental concerns, which is why arguments for nuclear’s environmental advantages often fall on deaf ears. The movement originated out of a panic among European and American intellectuals in the 1950s and ’60s about overpopulation, expressed most luridly in such popular books as the entomologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1969 “The Population Bomb.” They believed more power plants would exacerbate human density and urban growth. But nuclear power champions like Alvin Weinberg, the longtime director of America’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, countered that nuclear could supply energy enough to forestall the social collapse the neo-Malthusians feared. In the end, the green revolution and the demographic transition that followed third-world economic development met food needs and limited population growth, now predicted to level off at 10 billion by 2100. But by then nuclear power was anathema to the Democratic Party and American and European Greens, a tragic misalignment of liberal values.