My mother was arrested in 1978, protesting the Diablo Canyon nuclear site in Northern California. She worked for the Snake River Alliance, “Idaho’s Nuclear Watchdog” in the 1990s, and traveled to the Soviet Union in 1990 to protest nuclear armaments. I grew up with a poster that said “Disarmament for a Safer World for our Children” hanging on my wall. Nuclear power was not a positive thing ever in my childhood.
I despised the wording and the bias of The Breakthrough Institute’s FAQs about nuclear power. They claimed that the were “confronting” the “basic facts of the technology” but they hardly discussed the technology itself. They talked around the technology– about its relationship with global warming, with other energy sources, with human casualties, but I didn’t feel like I had any better or clearer understanding of the pros and cons or the costs and benefits of nuclear power. I could not comfortably create a policy based upon Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s FAQ sheet.
What specifically threw me off guard was the wording of these so-called frequently asked questions. It sounded like a whiny non-environmentalist, like our hypothetical libertarian uncle. That might be the target audience, someone who doesn’t know much about nuclear power and wasn’t dead-set against it at birth like I was. Additionally, the authors threw around concepts like solving “global warming” and “nuclear proliferation” like they were simple, defined concepts that could be thrown into a discussion on nuclear power nonchalantly. Social constructions and the true complexities of the controversy were ignored and reduced. In the introduction, these “facts” about nuclear power meant to unveil the mythology surrounding nukes and reactors and uranium were identified as “good and bad.” Essentially, essentialism.