Nuclear Power and Climate Change – Against the Current
▻https://againstthecurrent.org/atc210/nuclear-power-and-climate-change
Against the Current No. 210, January/February 2021
The 21st Century Plague
— The Editors
Nuclear Power and Climate Change
— Ansar Fayyazuddin
Motherhood and Labor in the Pandemic
— Ursula McTaggart
Building a Union Campaign
— an interview with Dawn Tefft
Peru: Rising Up Against Corruption
— an intervew with Andrea Palacios
Behind the Farmer’s Strike
— Aditya Nigam
Black Resistance
New Challenges for African Americans
— Malik Miah
The Freedom Struggle Is a Labor Struggle, Then & Now
— Robin D. G. Kelley
James Baldwin for Our Time
— Mary Helen Washington
The American Caste System
— Malik Miah
The U.S. South and Labor’s Fate
— Alex Lichtenstein
Recovering William Monroe Trotter
— Derrick Morrison
Reviews
The Trauma of Domestic Violence
— Giselle Gerolami
When Science Meets Capital
— Guy Miller
Hong Kong: An Uprising and Its Fate
— Promise Li
Indonesia as Testing Ground
— Allen Ruff
Livio Maitan: A Life in the Revolution
— John Barzman
Cultural Notes
On the Life of Justin Townes Earle
— Alexander Billet
Ansar Fayyazuddin
Chernobyl’s”accident” continues.
NUCLEAR REACTORS AS sources of electrical power date back to the late 1940s, when Soviet scientists first harnessed heat produced as a by-product of plutonium production to generate steam to drive electricity-producing turbines. From these ignominious beginnings in weapons production, nuclear reactors were quickly elevated to a “peaceful” and socially beneficial technology by the propaganda machines of both belligerents of the Cold War.
In this carefully crafted public image, nuclear power came to represent science with the aura of magic — it would be, in the famous and now discredited words, an energy source “too cheap to meter.”
Far from delivering on this promise, nuclear power has been an abject failure in every respect that its advocates themselves proposed as measures of its success. Yet despite this record of failure, we are seeing a revival in the advocacy of nuclear power. It is touted by some as a climate-change mitigation strategy. The purpose of this article is to interrogate the claims of these proposals and explore nuclear power’s larger consequences for humanity and nature.
