Hostility to nuclear power is declining, reports The Doomslayer:
- Germany signaled it will no longer oppose classifying nuclear power alongside renewables in EU law.
- Sweden plans to build an additional 5 GW of nuclear capacity by 2035.
- The Danish parliament repealed a 40-year-old ban on nuclear reactors.
- President Trump signed four executive orders intended to expedite nuclear reactor approval, boost domestic fuel supply, authorize reactor construction on federal land, and dramatically expand US nuclear energy production.
- The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission determined that California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant can run safely for at least 20 more years.
- Lawmakers in Massachusetts and Illinois are considering lifting their states’ nuclear moratoria.
Belgium has canceled its plans to shut down its nuclear power plants.
Chinese researchers hope to make nuclear power cheaper through a new process for extracting uranium from water. China has also built the first thorium reactor ever built, in the Gobi Desert.
Nuclear power is already “the safest form of energy we have, if you consider deaths per megawatt of energy produced,” notes Yale University’s Steven Novella. “Wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants,” notes an environmentalist. And “solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste,” such as “dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.”
Nuclear plants emit no air pollution, only harmless steam. Unlike wind farms, nuclear power plants don’t kill birds. The biggest utility that generates wind power pleaded guilty to federal crimes for killing 150 eagles.
