The energy policy debate in America was woefully incomplete until the nuclear disaster occurred in Japan. The public wasn't informed that nuclear power plants hold awesome radioactive threats that cause cancer, threats that are here and now, and very real.
The federal government and the nuclear lobby are advancing these radioactive factories as a clean and safe solution to climate change.
The push for a revival of nuclear power gives new meaning to the old phrase "pick your poison." The nuclear crowd is urging that we replace carbon dioxide with plutonium. We must learn the fundamental lesson from the Fukushima disaster that it is time to turn away from this extraordinarily dangerous technology.
Let's get real – a few pounds of plutonium fashioned into a bomb can bring down a city. But a millionth of an ounce will produce lung cancer in a human being with virtually 100 percent statistical certainty. Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years. So it is dangerous for about half a million years.
There are two massive risks to life on this plant – climate change and nuclear power. Climatologists tell us that this decade is our last clear chance to avoid massive destruction of our way of life by climate change. And we are now well aware that nuclear reactors and their spent fuel pools can release massive amounts of radioactive poisons that contaminate people and land for centuries. In addition, the nuclear plants create waste that are dangerous for a hundred thousand years and don't even have a containment vessel to protect it. And there is no storage solution in sight.
We are at a crossroads. The next few years may be the most important in human history. Either we will get the awesome threats of climate change and nuclear annihilation under control, or we will rightfully be blamed by future generations of neglecting the opportunity to resolve these problems.
Unfortunately, we're not facing either of these threats head-on. In fact, powerful forces are at work to use the risk of climate change as an excuse to exacerbate the risks of nuclear power. Even in the face of a nuclear disaster actually happening, the reaction of the federal government and industry is that this will just teach us to make the nukes safer. And the environmental leaders seem to have lost their voice.
The choice cannot be – and is not – between plutonium and carbon dioxide. It is between the sun and the wind on one hand and plutonium and carbon dioxide on the other. But that choice isn't being articulated by the president, Congress or the mainstream media.
Environmental leaders and ordinary Americans need to start speaking truth to power. The young people in Egypt have taught us that every citizen can be a leader.
We can take a lesson from a true story about President Franklin Roosevelt. When citizens asked him to adopt a particular program his reaction was, "OK, you convinced me. OK, now go out and make me do it." President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress badly need a sizable number of American people to "make them do it." We all need to get active to turn the tide in our critical time: To turn away from the poisons of fossil fuels and nuclear power to clean and safe renewable energy used efficiently.
Anything short of such a clean break away from the past use of poisons assures more disasters.
The nation faces an awesome challenge that combines public safety, jobs, national security and the environment. Enlightened leadership can inspire America to meet this challenge. Only then will our best days be ahead of us.
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S. David Freeman is former deputy mayor of Los Angeles for energy and the environment and general manager of SMUD, and author of “Winning Our Energy Independence.” Daniel Hirsch is a lecturer in nuclear policy at the University of California at Santa Cruz.