LA Times: Nuclear power must be a part of greener future

Nuclear energy’s importance in reducing emissions is beyond dispute. In January, the International Energy Agency called nuclear power “a critical element in limiting greenhouse gas emissions.” It calculated that global nuclear generation capacity must more than double by 2050 (to about 750 gigawatts) if there is any hope of limiting temperature increases to the 2 degrees that is widely agreed as acceptable.

In 2013, four of the world’s leading climate scientists signed an open letter in which they said that renewable energy sources like wind and solar “cannot scale up fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires.” The authors — former NASA climatologist James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tom Wigley of the University of Adelaide in Australia, and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution — wrote that “there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.”