Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

28. McKibben says he favored closing Vermont Yankee because he thought it would be replaced by renewables. “One of the reasons that it made sense to shut [Vermont Yankee] down was the promise that it would be replaced with renewable energy,” McKibben wrote.

29. In so saying, McKibben betrays an inconsistency — and ulterior motive. If climate change were his primary motivation then he would advocate that renewables replace fossil fuels, not nuclear.

30. Instead of acknowledging the reality that solar & wind are too unreliable to replace nuclear, McKibben blamed politicians. He told me they “bowed to opponents of wind power, and imposed a de facto moratorium on new wind turbines. I thought that was a mistake.”

31. In the 1950s and 1960s, nuclear energy was hugely popular, and was supported by large majorities of the public. In response, electric utilities committed to build over 200 nuclear reactors between 1966 and 1973. As late as 1975, there were plans to build 1,000 reactors.

32. But, starting in the late 1960s, anti-nuclear weapons activists joined forces with misanthropic conservationists to block the deployment of America’s largest source of clean energy.

33. “Historically, the antinuclear movement didn’t emerge from environmental concerns, which is why arguments for nuclear’s environmental advantages often fall on deaf ears,” noted the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Richard Rhodes, in The New York Times last Sunday.

34. “The movement originated out of a panic among European and American intellectuals in the 1950s and ’60s about overpopulation,” wrote Rhodes.

35. Anti-nuclear groups had already demonized nuclear weapons as not merely dangerous but also evil and immoral. It was an easy pivot for them to demonize nuclear energy.

36. Psychologists described the transference of fear, anger, and hatred from one object or person to another as “displacement." We may hate the boss but he’s too powerful to confront so we kick the dog instead. Nuclear energy was the scapegoat for the persistence of weapons.

37. In 1973 a German coal executive named E.F. Schumacher published "Small is Beautiful" which exalted the lifestyles of poor Indian farmers & demonized nuclear plants as “the most serious agent of pollution of the environment and the greatest threat to man’s survival on earth.”

38. Media-savvy activists claimed a nuclear power accident would be like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "A nuclear accident could wipe out Cleveland and the survivors would envy the dead,” consumer advocate Ralph Nader told credulous journalists and hysterical crowds in the early 1970s.

39. Their efforts worked. Researchers in the mid-1970s found that “distrust of nuclear power is… rooted in the fear of nuclear weapons.”

40. Their explicit goal was to make nuclear expensive. "Our campaign stressing the hazards of nuclear power will supply a rationale for increasing regulation,” wrote the Sierra Club Executive Director in a 1975 memo to the board of Directors, “and add to the cost of the industry”

41. Anti-nuclear campaigners managed to kill all but roughly 100 reactors. What got built in their place? Coal plants.

42. Had just 400 of the promised 1,000 reactors been built, the U.S. would today be producing nearly 100 percent of its electricity from zero-emissions sources, obviating the need for a climate crusade to clean up electricity.

43. In the early 1990s, the Soviet Union dissolved along with communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. The threat of nuclear war between great powers faded.

44. Environmentalists needed new justification for renewables. They found it in climate change. Those who had advocated renewables as an alternative to nuclear energy now argued for renewables as an alternative to fossil fuels.

45. But there was a problem. Leading climate scientists including NASA’s James Hansen started speaking out for nuclear power. By 2016, more of them were advocating the continued operation of nuclear plants than renewables.

46. In response, activists like McKibben distanced themselves from Hansen and instead heaped praise on a Stanford professor who claimed to have proven that the world could be powered on renewables alone.

47. “I’m convinced by the careful work of Mark Jacobson and others that [100% renewables] is possible,” McKibben said in 2016.

48. But in 2017, a major study found that Jacobson’s modeling had rested upon the false assumption that the U.S. could increase the power from its hydroelectric dams ten-fold. Their real potential turned out to be just one percent of that.

49. Without all that extra dam power, Jacobson’s house of cards falls apart. That’s because there’s no other practical way to store large quantities of energy.

50. As a result, every time anti-nuclear climate campaigners succeed in closing a nuclear plant, whether in California, Germany, or Vermont, the burning of fossil fuels, and carbon emissions, go up.

51. As such, the world’s climate advocates have for 30 years misled the world into thinking their main concern is reducing emissions when in reality it is shutting down nuclear plants and scaling up renewables

52. Beyond increasing pollution, the anti-nuclear agenda degrades nature in another way: by blanketing wild & bucolic landscapes with gigantic solar & wind farms in direct violation of the small-is-beautiful ethos. The result is increasing grassroots environmental resistance.

53. Consider Vermont. The only wind farm to be built in the entire state over the last 10 years was the Deerfield Wind Project. According to Lisa Linowes of Wind Action, it took from 2009 to 2017 for the project to be completed.

54. Why the long delay? Because of litigation stemming from the fact that the giant wind farm “is sited in the middle of critical black bear habitat.”

55. Can you guess how many wind farms the size of Deerfield would be needed in order to replace the annual quantity of electricity from Vermont Yankee, one of the smallest nuclear plants remaining in the U.S. when it was closed? The answer is 59.

56. At the Deerfield rate of deployment, Vermont will make up for the clean energy lost from the closure of Vermont Yankee some time around the year 2491.

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