Nuclear Adopts ‘Emergency Framing’ .... Can't Deliver

[Oscar]

Nuclear Adopts ‘Emergency Framing’ Around Climate, But Still Can’t Deliver: M.V. Ramana

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- Susan O'Donnell - Aug 03, 2024

EXCERPT: "20 years ago, you would have been laughed out of the room for claiming that nuclear energy is clean technology. The urgency of the climate crisis has drawn some people to some strange conclusions.
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Despite nuclear energy’s notorious problems, the industry remains remarkably resilient, receiving solid support from governments around the world.

Most recently in Canada, a ministerial working group of federal cabinet members issued “a plan to modernize federal assessment and permitting processes to get clean growth projects built faster.” It includes aligning “federal, provincial, and industry resources to ensure nuclear energy remains a strategic asset to Canada now and into the future.”

A prolific and well-known critic of the nuclear industry in Canada is physicist and professor M.V. Ramana, Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the University of British Columbia. Ramana is back in Vancouver after spending the winter academic term at Princeton University in the U.S., where he previously worked as a researcher for many years.

I last spent time in person with Ramana in June in Montreal where we co-organized a conference panel on Challenging the Canadian Nuclear Establishment. We spoke by phone in July about his new book published this month, "Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change".

O’Donnell: Your last book was about nuclear power in India. Your new book is about nuclear energy and the climate crisis. Why did you want to write about that? . . . .

For these investors, the environmental and other risks associated with nuclear power are not challenges they think they’ll have to deal with. They are not going to live near a nuclear waste repository, or a uranium mine, or even a nuclear plant, so they're not particularly concerned about all these environmental impacts."

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[Oscar]

Scary Times Produce Scary Decisions

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by Mitchell Beer - Aug 17, 2024

EXCERPT: "None of us make our best decisions when we’re in a state of panic. And the worst way to respond to climate change is to assume there’s nothing we can do to slow it down. . . . . Pointing to another moment where a panic reaction to climate change is pulling solutions in the wrong direction, physicist M.V. Ramana talked about the “emergency framing” that has the federal government and some provinces looking past the financial, environmental, and safety risks of expanded nuclear development.

“About 20 or 30 years ago, if someone had talked about nuclear energy as an environmentally friendly, clean technology, they probably would have been laughed out of the room,” Ramana told guest columnist Susan O’Donnell on The Weekender. But in an emergency framing that casts climate change as the “overwhelming problem,” he added, “we are asked to ignore every other consideration in addressing that.” . . . .

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