✒️ We let fear write our energy policy

⚛️ For most of my life, nuclear power felt like a betrayal of everything I stood for.

🍄 Growing up in the Alps, I was told which mushrooms to avoid in the forests near my home still radioactive from Chernobyl. The Greenpeace magazine I read told me nuclear power was the enemy of the planet. When Fukushima hit and Merkel announced Germany's nuclear exit, I strongly believed we were standing on the right side of history. 

📊 The science was never ambiguous. Nuclear is statistically the safest form of energy generation we have along with a negligible carbon footprint. The waste problem, while real, is orders of magnitude more manageable than the CO2 we pump into the atmosphere every single day.

😔 And yet the environmental movement spent decades fighting it. We have let fear and emotion write energy policy and we’ve paid the price. And so has the planet. France generates some of the cheapest, cleanest electricity in Europe, because of nuclear power. Meanwhile, Germany locked itself into decades of coal and gas and some of the highest energy bills on the continent.

☣️ This is exactly why nuclear power is so uncomfortable to talk about. Because coming to terms with it means confronting the possibility that we got it badly wrong and may have inadvertently set back the cause we dedicated ourselves to.

🔬 There is no one better to have this conversation with than Dr Tim Gregory . He's a nuclear chemist working at Sellafield nuclear site every day. Someone who works with the science, the reality, and the complexity of nuclear up close. His book Going Nuclear is one the most rigorous and accessible dismantling of nuclear mythology I've come across.

🎙️ With Tim, I want to dig into why the emotional case against nuclear was so powerful, why it won for so long, and what it actually cost us.

😬 This one won't be comfortable. But that's the point and why I launched my “Uncomfortable Climate” series. You can check previous episodes on geoengineering and decarbonising oil and gas in the comments.

👇 Drop your questions in the comments and sign up for our LinkedIn Live on Monday May 25th at 6PM CEST: https://lnkd.in/ewtZD4Ur

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