Skills devoted to nuclear weapons are needed to combat climate change

Timmon Wallis, Director of NuclearBan.US, explains how the “Skills devoted to nuclear weapons are needed to combat climate change.” His 2023 book on Warheads to Windmills documents how the life cycle costs of wind and solar energy per megawatt hour is less than for fossil fuels and nuclear. Fossil fuels currently win in the marketplace, because they have substantial control of the media and the political process, which has so far allowed them to keep infant industry subsidies when they should be taxed in proportion to the damage caused by their contributions to global warming. Nuclear wins in the marketplace, because they are excused from paying for three critical components of their life cycle costs. One problem is that they produce radioactive waste for which no satisfactory disposal process has yet been found. Another is that they do not have to pay for insurance to cover the damage done in accidents; those costs are carried by taxpayers or are not covered at all, carried by the people injured or killed from nuclear accidents. More subtly, the cost of the nuclear fuel is buried in the military budget and is increasing, because the concentration of uranium in the available ores is declining.

Wind and solar are relatively new technologies. As a result, unit costs are still declining relatively rapidly due to experience curve effects: The unit costs of many different products have been observed to decline at roughly a constant percentage with each doubling of the cumulative production. Fossil fuels and nuclear are mature technologies, which means that their cumulative production is not likely to double any time soon. As a result, their unit cost will not likely to decline much more in the future.

Moreover, Timmon argues that the people currently making nuclear weapons in the US and elsewhere have the skills needed to combat global warming. Instead, they are increasing the risks of nuclear Armageddon.

Timmon holds a PhD in Peace Studies and has been involved in peace building projects in North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia.

Copyright 2024 Timmon Wallis, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license

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