Image by Frédéric Paulussen.

Last June, Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin, praised the potential of nuclear energy, writing in The Guardian, “Nuclear is an idea whose time came and seemed to have passed, but may indeed have a future. For those of us looking for a solution to climate change, the least we can ask is that no plants like Indian Power close until we have a clean, dependable and scalable alternative already in place.”

Central to Sunkara’s argument was that we can easily separate the science of nuclear power from the technology of atomic weapons. “Some of the paranoia is no doubt rooted in cold war-era associations of peaceful nuclear power with dangerous nuclear weaponry. We can and should separate these two, just like we are able to separate nuclear bombs from nuclear medicine.”