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The nuclear industry has aggressively rebranded itself as eco-friendly. John Ritch, the head of the World Nuclear Association, an international trade group, has painted nuclear as the only barrier against apocalypse: "We must place ourselves on a trajectory for a twenty-first-century nuclear industry that achieves the deployment of nothing less than 8,000-10,000 gigawatts of nuclear power"--that is, more than 20 times current capacity. "To plan for anything less would be to invite environmental disaster." This kind of hyperbole infuriates skeptics of the nuclear renaissance, who note that nuclear power cannot grow nearly fast enough to "solve" global warming--the optimistic scenario put forward by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) predicts the amount of nuclear power will merely double by 2030.
But hyping nuclear power brings greater problems than false hope. During the cold war, the anti-nuclear conflation of security threats with environmental concerns made little sense. The spread of atomic power had nothing to do with why the United States and the Soviet Union were building nuclear arsenals or whether they might someday use them. But, as fears of terrorism took precedence, the potential spread of fissile material has made the environmental movement's once-spurious national security linkages more credible.
