Nuclear power: the missing piece of the puzzle

There is reason to suspect that the original Green hostility to nuclear power was encouraged and subsidised by the U.S. fossil fuel industry, which has always been quick to spot emerging potential rivals and sabotage them. But the hostility is self-sustaining now, fed by fantasy statistics and deliberate scare-mongering.

There are currently 441 commercial nuclear reactors in the world, supplying about 10 per cent of the world’s electricity. There could have been three or four times as much nuclear power by now if the Green movement had not exploited a couple of accidents in the 1970s and '80s to cripple it, writes Gwynne Dyer.Photograph courtesy of Unsplash

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

January 4, 2022

LONDON, U.K.—At the stroke of midnight last Friday, half of Germany’s remaining nuclear power stations closed down. The remaining three plants (of an original 17) will shut down on Dec. 31 of this year, and Germans will no long...

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