Advocates of nuclear power have been arguing for a couple of decades that climate change mitigation is an argument for building a new generation of nuclear power plants, which they claim will provide safe, clean, and cheap electricity. More recently, corporations and governments promoting nuclear energy have a new set of allies: tech industry companies who have been arguing that nuclear power is necessary to feed the exploding electricity demand from rapidly proliferating data storage and processing centers that support industries from web-based commerce to artificial intelligence. Dr. M.V. Ramana, author of the book Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change (Verso 2024), will address industry claims that this time around they will be able to build safe, reliable nuclear plants that can generate electricity at competitive prices—and will finally solve the problem of what to do with the radioactive waste they generate. He will also discuss the old and new political and economic alliances that have kept the nuclear industry afloat despite nearly seven decades of unfulfilled promises.
This webinar is presented by the Coordinating Committees of the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons and United for Peace and Justice.
M.V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security and Professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. In addition to Nuclear is not the Solution, he is the author of The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India (Penguin Books, 2012) and co-editor of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream (Orient Longman, 2003). Ramana is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, the Canadian Pugwash Group, the International Nuclear Risk Assessment Group, and the team that produces the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Leo Szilard Award from the American Physical Society. He also is a member of the Global Council of the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons.