John Wayne squares off against Jim Hansen

Nuclear’s safety record is quite good. How many people have been killed in the United States by nuclear accidents? I think it is zero. With 100 reactors.
— Climate Scientist Emeritus James Hansen, COP-25 Madrid.

After leaving a press conference in the COP-25 climate meeting with my ears burning, it has taken me more than a month to sit down and write this essay. I greatly admire James Hansen and have since the day I sat in the Senate gallery for his testimony to Al Gore and Tim Wirth’s hearings on climate change in 1988. Hansen was a pioneer climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who had been muzzled by President George H.W. Bush and was supposed to submit all his testimony for White House review before speaking. He ignored the instruction and that eventually cost him his grants and compelled him to resign his position.

What annoys me, however, about Hansen, then and now, is his insistence, in utter disregard of best science, that nuclear energy can somehow save humanity from climate change because it is clean, safe, too cheap to meter and besides all that, is carbon-free. I watched with pity more than scorn when he took his time to repeat this nonsense at the recent UN climate conference in…