Having urged FDR to build the first nuclear bomb as the threat from Nazi Germany mounted, Albert Einstein later became haunted by the legacy of risks he knew nuclear power had left for us.  To that end, he gave this advice:  "To the village square we must carry the facts of atomic energy. From there must come America's voice."

30 years since the United States built a nuclear power plant and a climate crisis later (OK so depending on who you ask), nuclear power presents a compelling possibility on a scale large enough to meet energy demands without greenhouse gases.

In taking another look at nuclear power, we must do the hard work of understanding the facts and the uncomfortable work of having real conversations between people who disagree.  We're a little rusty at both, but up to the challenge I think.

The stakes couldn't really get higher.

But nuclear carries emotional baggage - the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, big mushroom cloud variety of baggage.  We are hardly predisposed to listening dispassionately, and yet we must.  In this next generation of America's nuclear debate, some of what we "know" about nuclear power isn't true anymore and some never was.

To make good decisions on nuclear energy's future, we need to cut through the emotion and find good facts. 

In the book Power to Save the World author Gwenyth Cravens asks Sandia National Laboratories scientist Rip Anderson "what could terrorists do with yellowcake?" His answer isn't exactly what most of us would expect:

Not much in the way of causing any real harm. They could wrap conventional explosives around yellowcake and disperse it. That would make a Geiger counter tick a little faster and scare people who didn't know much about yellowcake, but uranium particles are very heavy and would tend to fall right back to earth, unlike airborne chemical agents that can travel distances. If you were near the explosion you could take a shower as a precaution to remove any radionuclides that might have collected on you. The yellowcake could be cleaned up. But at this point in its life cycle uranium is only mildly radioactive. When I visited Ambrosia Lake back in the 1960s, there were lots of barrels of yellowcake sitting around. You could safely put your hand into it. It was OK as long as you didn't ingest it.

The EPA has a standard nicknamed Fencepost Man inside the nuclear industry.  Fencepost Man is a hypothetical individual that you assume lives all year on the boundary of a nuclear site and grows all his food there and draws all his water from its wells. The people running the site have to make sure that it exposes Fencepost Man to no more than 15 rnillirem a year.  As a point of comparison, cooking dinner on a gas stove exposes you to 9 millirem a year.