Weinberg’s enthusiasm for nuclear’s humanitarian potential was infectious, and spread to John F. Kennedy, who visited Oak Ridge National Lab with his wife, Jackie, and Senator Al Gore Sr., just months before being elected president.

Weinberg was more than a great nuclear engineer; he was also a dedicated activist. He championed President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace initiative with urgency in the fifties. He fought for safer nuclear in the sixties. And he warned of climate change in the seventies.

In 1979, Weinberg’s fears were realized when one of the reactors at Three Mile Island lost its coolant and partially melted. Weinberg thought there was something wrong with light water reactor designs, and his view was influential even among nuclear’s antagonists. “The Chernobyl [sic] [Three Mile Island] accident was caused by design failure not operator error,” said Ralph Nader.

Nuclear never recovered from the accident. Its share of global electricity has declined seven points since its peak in 1996. French nuclear giant Areva failed in 2015 and Japanese-American nuclear giant Westinghouse, owned by Toshiba, failed earlier this year. //

Meanwhile, the crisis facing nuclear is quickening. Asia was supposed to lead the nuclear renaissance. Now, Japan isn’t restarting its nuclear, Taiwan and South Korea are following Germany, Switzerland and France are phasing out nuclear, and all while Vietnam opted for coal rather than nuclear.

There’s no secret why. Just watch the trailer for “Pandora,” the big budget disaster movie that took South Korea by storm last fall. Greenpeace — an organization with an annual budget of $350 million— coordinated protests afterwards, which helped elect a new president who is seeking to reduce nuclear’s share of electricity from 30 to 20 percent by 2030. //

Nader crusaded across the United States training local activists on how to kill nuclear plants, or at least delay their construction. Nader was deliberately inflammatory. “A nuclear plant could wipe out Cleveland, and the survivors would envy the dead.” //

The Sierra Club joined Nader’s crusade. “Our campaign stressing the hazards of nuclear power will supply a rationale for increasing regulation... and add to the cost of the industry...” the new executive director [Michael McCloskey] said in a secret, internal memo.

They all advocated burning coal and fossil fuels instead. Nader said, “We do not need nuclear power...We have a far greater amount of fossil fuels in this country than we’re owning up to...the tar sands...oil out of shale...methane in coal beds...” Sierra Club consultant Amory Lovins said, “Coal can fill the real gaps in our fuel economy with only a temporary and modest (less than twofold at peak) expansion of mining.”

You might wonder: maybe people back then didn’t know coal was bad for health and the climate? In fact, it was such commonplace knowledge that the New York Times reported on its front page that coal’s death toll would rise to 56,000 if coal instead of nuclear plants were built. The Sierra Club pushed for coal anyway and even forced utilities to convert nuclear plants into coal plants in Haven, Wisconsin. //

After being fired in 1972, Weinberg campaigned to save nuclear power. Along with Roger Revelle, Weinberg was one of the first American scientists to draw attention to threat posed by climate change and, also along with Revelle, urged that nuclear instead of coal plants be built. “I went from office to office in Washington, curves of the carbon dioxide buildup in hand, Weinberg wrote. I reminded them that nuclear energy was on the verge of dying. Something must be done. I almost screamed.”

The people who today claim to care about climate change ignored Weinberg’s warnings. “California Governor Jerry Brown said, ‘I want the Department of Water Resources to build a coal plant.’ So we embarked on the planning of a coal plant... a dreadful prospect.” //

In the 50s and 60s, people knew nuclear power wasn’t like a bomb. It was only later that the two were deliberated mixed together such as by the organizers of the “No Nukes” concerts, putting on stage a soldier exposed to nuclear weapons testing along with a pregnant mother from near Three Mile Island. //

Anti-nuclear leaders knew what they were doing and, toward the end of their lives, were honest. “If you’re trying to get people aroused about what is going on, you use the most emotional issue you can find,” one wrote.

And when nuclear plant construction couldn’t be stopped, it could be delayed, sending costs soaring — along with the number of federal regulations. In the end, 150 percent more nuclear plants were canceled than built.

“Unless changes are made to restore public confidence,” Weinberg warned, “the Nuclear Age will come to a halt as the present reactors run their course…” //

Ralph Nader admitted to PBS News that he didn’t want to solve the waste problem ”because it'll just prolong the industry, and expand the second generation of nuclear plants subsidized by the taxpayer.”

If safety and waste were the main concerns of nuclear opponents, why would they oppose reactors that address them? To answer that question, we have to go back to 1953. In his Atoms for Peace speech President Eisenhower declared the US would work with the UN to give away nuclear energy for a very specific humanistic reason: “to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.

”Over the next decade, a growing number of people began to realize that nuclear energy is limitless and humankind would thus never again be at risk of running out of energy, fertilizer, fresh water, or food. This good news came at a time of widespread fears — many of them racist, as seen here on this 1960 Time magazine cover — of overpopulation.

But something strange happened. The people who claimed to be concerned about resource scarcity from overpopulation opposed nuclear precisely because it put an end to scarcity. “If a doubling of the state’s population in the next 20 years is encouraged by providing the power resources for this growth, [California’s] scenic character will be destroyed,” warned David Brower of the Sierra Club.

Their primary fear wasn’t accidents, waste or weapons — it was people. “In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” said Paul Ehrlich. “It’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean and abundant energy because of what we would do with it,” said Lovins.

“I didn’t really worry about the accidents because there are too many people anyway…I think that playing dirty if you have a noble end is fine,” confessed the Sierra Club member who led the campaign to kill Diablo Canyon. //

Some say that what is really scary about nuclear accidents is that they can affect the public, but if that’s the case, then why then hasn’t anyone heard about the Teton dam collapse three years before Three Mile Island, which killed 11 people and caused $2 billion in damage? Or of the Banqiao dam, which killed 171 thousand people?

The data are clear. Nuclear is the safest way to make reliable electricity. The most dangerous nuclear plant is the one that doesn’t get built. When nuclear plants aren’t built, or are shut down, fossil fuels are burned, and people die. //

What is it that makes nuclear cheap or expensive? The French and US nuclear construction data offer a natural experiment. The French managed to keep the construction costs of their nuclear plants relatively steady while US costs shot upwards. Why?

According to NRC Commissioner Ivan Selin, “The French have two kinds of reactors and hundreds of kinds of cheese, whereas in the United States the figures are reversed.” //

Debates over reactor design, size, and construction method are irrelevant so long as demand for nuclear remains low and declining. The innovation nuclear needs must be something more radical than anything that’s been proposed to day. What’s required is atomic humanism.

What is atomic humanism? I would like to offer three first principles that are meant as the beginning, not the end of the discussion of what atomic humanism should be.

First, nuclear is special. Only nuclear can lift all humans out of poverty while saving the natural environment. Nothing else — not coal, not solar, not geo-engineering — can do that.

How does the special child, who is bullied for her specialness, survive? By pretending she’s ordinary. As good as — but no better than! — coal, natural gas or renewables.

Like other atomic humanists of his time, Weinberg knew nuclear was special. But he could not fully appreciate how special nuclear was given the low levels of deployment of solar and wind.

Now that these two technologies have been scaled up, we can see that nuclear’s specialness is due due an easy-to-understand physical reason: the energy density of the fuel.

Consider that the share of electricity the world gets from clean sources of energy over the last 10 years declined by the equivalent of 21 Bruce nuclear power plants, which powers Toronto, which produces about the same amount of electricity as 900 Topaz solar farms.

Bruce power sits on 9 square kilometers and Topaz sits on 25 square kilometers, so it would take 1,075 square kilometers, or twice the size of Toronto, to generate the same amount of energy with solar as with nuclear.

The environmental impacts are enormous. When they built another solar farm, Ivanpah, dozens of threatened desert tortoises, which can live to be 80 years old, were killed.

The energy density of the fuel determines its environmental impact. With higher energy densities, fewer natural resources are used, requiring less mining, materials, waste, pollution and land.

And it's increasingly obvious that only nuclear can significantly and rapidly mitigate climate change. This fact has done more to change minds on nuclear in recent years than anything else.

"If we're going to tackle global warming, nuclear is the only way you can create massive amounts of power,” said the formerly anti-nuclear Sting.

"It’s like half the people who were saying ‘No nukes!’ are now realizing nuclear is the best way to go for energy for the future. I think it’s natural to reexamine your beliefs as you age up,” said Robert Downey Jr. //

Fundamentally, it’s not what makes nuclear safe, it’s who makes it safe. Every accident report says the same thing. Human factors and human-machine interaction matter most. Culture, training and discipline makes nuclear safe.

And resilience. Look at what the amazing people of nuclear did. In response to Three Mile Island, they responded resiliently and brilliantly, running the very same plants better, and raising their efficiency from 55 to over 90 percent. In what other industry is operator performance over 98 percent?