Time to go nuclear

One of the biggest obstacles to combating climate change has consistently come from coal states — West Virginia and Kentucky, specifically — declaring that Washington is waging a war against coal.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The nuclear power industry can offer everybody an important way to solve this argument. 

It’s pretty simple. We can build nuclear power plants in West Virginia and Kentucky and offer everyone working in the coal mining and coal power generation industry in those two states training to work in the new nuclear plants to be built there.

This proposal would eliminate the zero-sum, false choice battle being waged by both sides (shutting down coal plants = loss of jobs, or conversely, keeping the coal plants running = loss of climate stability).

West Virginia and Kentucky have many rivers that could serve as possible sites for nuclear power generation. In Kentucky, the Ohio River is just one possible candidate for a nuclear plant site. In West Virginia, the New River is a possible site for a nuclear plant. 

The nuclear industry can lay the groundwork for these plants with a communications campaign in Washington, D.C., West Virginia and Kentucky, promoting nuclear power as a resource providing jobs for those residents who undergo the proper training and certifications.

This is a hazy sketch of a solution to our need to develop clean and sustainable electric power.  Millions of details of these kinds of projects would of course need to be considered and worked through.

But this idea offers all parties a win-win solution. 

The government and the nuclear power industry would have the opportunity to help diminish carbon pollution and help decrease the odds of more carbon-dioxide induced droughts, food shortages, floods, forest loss and other climate disasters we don’t want to experience.

The coal states would get new employers with a far-seeing future ahead. Kentucky and West Virginia would get thousands of new, good-paying jobs for years to come, including construction and plant management positions, as well as more employment in the towns where the plants are located, increased tax revenues from the plants and increased economy activity in return.

Some may argue that these power plants may require cutting down numerous trees and the use of the water in the rivers where the plants will locate.  This is true.  However, the coal industry has leveled entire mountaintops over the decades, and destroyed innumerable acres of forested land. 

Overall, nuclear power plants provide net gains for new jobs, the economy and the environment  

That’s a good deal that everyone should want. 

I was a senior at SUNY-Binghamton in early 1979, when the Three Mile Island nuclear plant had its now-infamous accident.  Some radioactive gas was released into the air, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Our university was about 190 miles from the plant, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. There was a great deal of panic on campus.  

A lot of college kids went to Washington in school buses to protest nuclear power in May, about two months after the accident. There was another protest in New York City in September of that year, on landfill next to the old World Trade Center. That protest attracted about 200,000 people.  Additionally, a group of rock musicians staged “No Nukes” concerts in the city. There were international protests as well. 

In retrospect, the general sense of fear was not a very smart response. Dozens of nuclear plant projects were canceled. If those plants were built and on-line today, we would not be putting so much carbon dioxide into the air now. We should try to rectify our error then by building more nuclear plants now. 

To register your support for nuclear power, you can go to the www.nuclearmatters.com website. The web site is run by an organization that promotes nuclear energy as one way to help combat the climate change crisis we face. You can let the organization know that you support their approach to improving the economy and generating clean power.

Mike Gold lives and works in the Bronx.