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Moreover, the dangers and timescales involved are routinely exaggerated. Friends of the Earth offers as a reason for its opposition the claim that nuclear waste remains “dangerous for tens of thousands of years.”64 This is technically correct, but misleading nonetheless. The vast majority of waste will be no more radioactive than the natural uranium ore that it was originally derived from in just a few hundred years.65 And the isotopes that stay radioactive for longer (like isotopes of plutonium) can be recycled in other reactors, so need not be buried at all. In comparison, of course, hazardous wastes containing toxics like mercury and arsenic stay dangerous forever—and yet are barely controlled in much of the world and attract nothing like the passion that the nuclear issue does. The volumes of nuclear waste are also tiny compared with other competing technologies. A 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor produces less than 30 tonnes of used fuel per year, most of which can be reprocessed and used again. In comparison, a coal-fired plant of the same capacity will discharge 400,000 tonnes of ash and several million tonnes of carbon dioxide over the same year.66 Even after a quarter-century of using nuclear power to produce 80 percent of its electricity, France is still able to keep all the high-level waste generated by all its nuclear plants under the floor in a single room. This is not an “unsolved problem.” It is not really much of a problem at all.

All of this would be academic were nuclear not an essential part of any realistic plan to meet the climate change planetary boundary. As this book has shown, renewables are a crucial part of our tool kit but not enough on their own. The battle of the energy titans comes down to one great contest: nuclear versus coal. And by rejecting nuclear over past decades Greens have unwittingly kept the door open for this most polluting energy source of all. For example, several planned reactors in the United States, after being stridently opposed by Greens in the 1970s and 1980s, became coal stations instead. In Austria, after antinuclear activists won a nationwide referendum in 1978, a whole country turned from nuclear to coal—and an entire completed nuclear power station was pointlessly mothballed right after being built.

An interesting “what if?” exercise arises. What might be the quantity of carbon dioxide emitted over the last few decades from fossil-fueled power plants as an accidental by-product of antinuclear campaigning? In Austria, for example, six nuclear stations were proposed, and none were eventually used. In the U.S., at least 19 nuclear plants were canceled after being proposed—mainly due to the changing tide of public opinion brought on by the rise of the Greens. What if the nuclear build rate of the 1960s and 1970s had continued until today, and all these proposed plants had been welcomed by the rising environmental movement? There can of course be no definitive answer to such a question, but if we say that 150 additional plants would by now have been running for 20 years, these would have avoided the emission of 18 billion tonnes of CO2.67 In climate change terms, opposing nuclear was a gargantuan error for the Greens, and one that will echo down the ages as our globe’s temperature rises. Some in the environmental movement have begun to realize this mistake, including members of the Green Party and the former director of Greenpeace U.K., Stephen Tindale, who courageously joined with me to make a front-page “mea culpa” declaration in the Independent newspaper on February 23, 2009.68 In the U.S., both Stewart Brand and NASA scientist (and planetary boundaries co-author) James Hansen have strongly supported nuclear in the battle against climate change. In Britain, my friend and colleague the writer George Monbiot, one of the Green movement’s most fearsome and well-known campaigners, wrote in the Guardian that the Fukushima disaster had convinced him that nuclear power was actually less dangerous than his environmental