I wrote this letter to the editor of the New Yorker. It’s been long enough that I doubt they’ll print it, but I wanted to share my thoughts. Using nuclear and, if it ever works, fusion today is like someone in the 1950s throwing a plastic plate into the ocean, figuring, “The ocean is so big and the plate is so small, what difference could it make even if everyone threw plastic away?”

People don’t understand exponentials, even people who work with them, but an economy that grows by even a small percent annually grows exponentially. So will its waste, including the heat from generating power.

To the editor,

Elizabeth Kolbert’s piece on environmentalists rethinking nuclear doesn’t ask why the Japanese, who know the pain of nuclear damage, built Fukushima where tsunamis could hit. They also know world-class engineering and earthquakes. They built it there because like nearly all energy plants, it needs coolant, meaning water, even at the risk of tsunamis and earthquakes.

The water doesn’t only cool the plant. The plant heats the water. Liberating energy stored in atoms heats the globe, just like sunlight. The heating from one plant is as negligible as one plastic cup in the ocean. A paper, Limits to Economic Growth, in the peer-reviewed Nature Physics showed that heating from plants fired by any means — nuclear, fossil fuels, or even fusion — would rival that from trapped solar heat within about a human lifetime at current growth rates.

In other words, nuclear and fusion warm the globe directly, like putting a piece of the sun in our atmosphere. Solar panels augment that heating by trapping sunlight, including at greater environmental cost for creating the materials.

It’s tempting for those who consider more energy sources necessary for life to lose hope, but that life doesn’t need that energy. Our culture does, but it’s no longer serving us.

I speak from experience. I disconnected my Manhattan apartment from the electric grid three years ago as an experiment, with no idea how I would make it more than a few days. Hands-on practical experience taught me in a week how to make the month, the month enabled a season. Next thing I know, next month I begin year four. I closed my Con-Ed account. I’m mostly learning to live how everyone on earth did before grids, a century ago. What I do helps not hurts those with least access, and empowers.

Life doesn’t need more nuclear or other energy source. We need more hands-on practical experience living sustainably at every level.

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