 There are many people who are well-known environmentalists who are working on this problem They've made tremendous contributions to raising awareness and consciousness about it and have worked hard to sort of Wake the world up to the necessity of doing something before it's too late Jim Hanson is one He is a famous person in the United States who was you know had a had an important government position and He testified made a he made a very famous testimony before the US Congress Saying we now know you know your scientific employees working for your best agencies on this subject We now know that there really is global warming going on that it really is a serious threat And that is primarily anthropocentrically cause that it's human economic activity the burning of fossil fuels That's doing it. I mean this was a huge deal in the United States to have this is the official government position on it And of course it sparks the whole denialist while the Republicans and had the Republicans simply refused to say he's wrong So he's played an incredibly important role and he signed a letter With two other people of his of that kind recently an open letter to the environmental movement saying Please reconsider your opposition to to nuclear power to expanding nuclear power So I've been with you in the past but the climate situation is sufficiently serious and and and imminent that it really requires us to Reconsider all of our conclusions about priorities and what risks we're willing to take and so he urged a reconsideration a guy named Brand steward brand Wrote a book and was touring the United States and amongst other things. He also had a chapter in his book saying hey, I Was a anti nuclear activist in my youth It made sense back then the stuff's dangerous. Why are we doing this? But now it seems to me that We actually are desperate enough to reduce carbon Fuel emissions so that we have to you know, we need to reconsider So there are people who have raised this, you know, who's credential these are not These are not people who are shills for the for the nuclear power industry This isn't general electric or somebody whose research is funded by general electric Who's going to build all these plants and wants the the world to go nuclear and that's the response and people should understand I I mean that is quite predictably happening. There's a powerful lobby out there That wants to build these nuclear plants. It's very good. It's very lucrative profitable business In a lot of ways, it's sort of a part of this incredibly powerful military industrial complex It sort of fits into that whole, you know way of going about business So in my opinion, they are taking sort of they are shamelessly in a very self-interested way taking advantage of Rising awareness of the climate crisis to basically just Push, you know to get what they've always wanted which is permission to do more nuclear plants with big cost overruns and huge profit margins But what I'm saying is that we now have people who've always been with us on these issues saying doesn't this need reconsideration I think they're right that logically if you are far more concerned about the risk of climate change than you were in the past Not because you shouldn't have been in the past. You just weren't You made a mistake and now the new information lets us realize But if if we now realize that we should be far more concerned about climate change than in the past when we said Well, we don't need nuclear power doesn't that imply that there's a reconsideration in order? Yes So I would concede that we should rethink it But when I rethink it I come to the same conclusion Which is this is still not the best way and the right way to respond to climate change And the reason is rather simple There's improvements in technologies, but the essential problems are still there I mean the the dangers of nuclear power have not gone away There's no solution for the waste problem that still remains unsolved and If there's been a solution for the waste problem, it's been a long time So why should we believe that we are any closer to a solution of the waste problem when nobody has anything concrete to say on the subject and they've had all these years to come up with an answer and We have the Fukushima You know accident to remind us that is still a ticking bomb over there That place is still incredibly dangerous There can be more all sorts of things can go wrong right there at that site that are going to create incredible problems Do we really need so what it comes down to are we so desperate that we really need to run that kind of risk? Well, how much good does the nuclear power do? Well, right now when I read the studies what I see is We can expand Non-nuclear non fossil fuel energy production Faster and cheaper than we could build new nuclear plants That it's just not the efficient way to replace fossil fuels It's the it's too slow And it's too expensive Now if we didn't have wind and solar and energy conservation Available to us will then yes, we would be stuck with that But we have all that and all of the studies all of the information all of the cost estimates are Basically telling us that that's the expensive slow way to solve the problem It's very it's the way that some very powerful interests and lobby groups would like to have a solvent But I think it would be a terrible mistake, you know as for us to buy into that I don't think that's actually the effective solution