Bill Gates’ great $1B commitment to nuclear energy should be a wake-up call to climate progressives
Nuclear power could be America’s saving grace — if progressive activists would only stop kneecapping its spread.
Although it’s both clean and abundant, nuclear power is often overlooked by a misinformed public and environmental activists alike.
But change makers like Bill Gates are championing the technology, and should be celebrated for doing so.
The billionaire philanthropist has invested $1 billion in TerraPower, a brand new nuclear power plant which commenced construction in June in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
A 345-megawatt Natrium reactor — the next-generation of nuclear technology — it’s expected to be safer than traditional fission power plants because sodium is used to cool the reactor.
The plant, which has an estimated total cost of $4 billion, is yet to be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but Gates said that he’s confident TerraPower will hold up to scrutiny.
“This milestone marks a significant step forward for the future of nuclear energy,” Nuclear Energy Institute president Maria Korsnick told The Post. “We are shaping a brighter, cleaner future for our nation.”
She’s right. Nuclear power is quite possibly the key to a cleaner environment in the future.
It’s a zero-emission energy source which doesn’t create polluting byproducts and is, theoretically, almost unlimited, given that it’s derived from the splitting of atoms.
To put it in perspective: Nuclear energy spared so much carbon dioxide in 2020 that it was the equivalent of removing 100 million cars from the road.
“This is a big step toward safe, abundant, zero-carbon energy, and it’s important for the future of this country that projects like this succeed,” Gates told NPR of his TerraPower project.
So where are all the climate alarmists cheering him on?
They’re advocating for futile solutions.
Environmentalists tend to champion inefficient and often unsightly renewable energy sources like solar and wind — all while ignoring or denigrating nuclear energy.
“Over time, it gradually struck me that there was really no amount of technological innovation that was going to make the sun shine more regularly or wind blow more reliably,” Michael Shellenberger, the founder of the pro-nuclear non-profit Environmental Progress and a former anti-nuclear activist himself, previously explained in a TED Talk.
He has pointed out that progressives like Bernie Sanders and Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts have long railed against nuclear energy and supported closing plants, all while purporting to be champions of the environment.
Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Green New Deal champion from Maine, even admitted that she and environmentalist politicians “all have a general resistance to [nuclear energy].”
Stubborn anti-nuclear activism can have real consequences.
Germany has shuttered all of its nuclear power plants in a gradual phase out that ended in 2022 — at the behest of the country’s progressive Green Party.
“It’s natural that those of us that became very concerned about climate change would gravitate towards really romantic solutions like harmonizing human civilization with the natural world using renewable energies,” Shellenberger, the author of “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,” said during his TED Talk.
“But I think it’s also understandable that as the facts have come in, many of us have started to question our prior beliefs and change our minds.”
Pragmatists like Gates see the miraculous potential nuclear energy holds, in spite of stigma and resistance.
And yet, activists are still living in an upside down world — more interested in hopelessly railing against big oil, indulging apocalyptic fantasies and dousing Van Gogh paintings in soup than actually solving problems.
It’s time the climate cult wake up and realize that the key to clean, efficient and abundant energy is right under their noses.
