The Sierra Club still hates nuclear power, according to a letter sent by the groups’ executive director to The Wall Street Journal Thursday, despite a week of speculation that the organization may be preparing to change its stance.
The Journal reported last Thursday that the environmental group was debating softening its stance on nuclear power as part of a general shift by environmentalists. This would have effectively eliminated an enormous political hurdle facing the global nuclear industry, but The Sierra Club claims that its position will not change.
“The Sierra Club remains in firm opposition to dangerous nuclear power,” Michael Brune, The Sierra Club’s executive director, wrote in the letter. “The article reflects wishful thinking on the part of the nuclear industry but doesn’t accurately represent the position of the Sierra Club. It is categorically incorrect to suggest that the Sierra Club considers nuclear power a ‘bridge’ to clean energy. Nuclear power, much like coal, oil and gas, is a bridge to nowhere…America’s energy future must be powered by 100% clean, renewable energy like wind and solar.”
The Sierra Club did not respond to requests for comment last Thursday when asked by The Daily Caller News Foundation if it was considering a policy change regarding nuclear power.
The Sierra Club has heavily lobbied against nuclear power and successfully increased the cost of nuclear plants and created artificial delays in construction. The Sierra Club opposes nuclear energy because it leads to “energy over-use and unnecessary economic growth.” The Club’s uncompromising policy has led to the creation and growth of new pro-nuclear environmental groups, like the Breakthrough Institute.
The Breakthrough Institute, which believes that nuclear power is imperative to both economic growth and solving global warming, states that “anyone truly concerned about climate change will need to reconsider their opposition to nuclear. It is the best chance we have to make big reductions in carbon emissions quickly.”
A single nuclear reactor can prevent 3.1 million tons of CO2 emissions annually, and there is a broad consensus across ideologies that nuclear power is “the most cost-effective zero-emission technology.” The Wall Street Journal previously stated that “[if] the world intends to address the threat of global warming and still satisfy its growing appetite for electricity, it needs an ambitious expansion of nuclear power.”
Nuclear plants are more environmentally friendly in many respects than wind or solar plants as they take up far less space and don’t require new development, according to academic studies. Opinion polls show that the more people know about nuclear power, the more likely they are to support it and that large majorities of scientists support nuclear power, as opposed to a majority of the general population.
Green heavy-weights like former NASA climatologist James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tom Wigley of the University of Adelaide in Australia, and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution signed an open letter in 2013 that said “there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power” because “green” energy sources like wind and solar “cannot scale up fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires.”
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