Fission Fast! – New Slogan Idea For Effective Energy Revolution

· · 28 Comments

Fission,
FAST!

My creative juices were inspired this morning by an article titled Climate is not a mass movement. The piece comes from Randy Olson, the filmmaker turned scientist who is most famous among my pro-nuclear communication friends as the author of Don’t Be Such a Scientist.

Aside: I wonder how many of the people in my pronuclear social media circles who have strongly advocated for Olson’s work as a science communicator know that he fondly remembers his participation in the “No Nukes” movement and thinks of it as a model for societal change? End Aside.

I found the post from the following tweet from Andy Revkin:

 

After reading Olson’s thought piece, I fired back the following tweets in rapid succession:

 

And

 

Olson is a good communicator and hit on some important concepts in his post, but his science interest is biology, not energy production. There is no doubt that the No Nukes movement contributed to a successful (so far) effort to push the world away from the use of nuclear energy, but there is also no doubt that the success of that movement – along with a whole series of poor decisions made by the people who were building nuclear power plants at the time – have put the world into a dangerous position.

The very danger that Olson wrote about – a changing climate that is being made ever more unstable by the forcing functions associated with an increasing atmospheric concentration of CO2 – could have been avoided by focusing first on science and technology and then on creating slogans aimed at encouraging positive action.
Read more »

Proud – but often frustrated – nuclear professional

· · 58 Comments

Kevan Crawford has published well-written op-ed titled Nuclear power answer to clean energy. He described some nuclear energy’s impressive benefits and compared them to the available alternative power sources, which were exposed as being vastly inferior based on an objective evaluation of their characteristics and limitations. Here is the disclaimer associated with Kevan’s opinion piece. [...]

Read more »

Sustainable, affordable, reliable energy

· · 13 Comments

Barry Brook is an Australian climate scientist who operates the well-respected forum on energy and environment called Brave New Climate. He recently published a video that takes just 2.5 minutes to summarize his view of the energy choices that face humanity. My bet is that you will want to share it with your friends and [...]

Read more »