Earth Day this year was a little more special than normal. The EarthX Congress of Conferences took place this year from April 20-22, and you bet nuclear energy was a popular topic.
There was so much going on this week, and really, environmentalism was covered from every angle. Whether you cared about things like tax credits or the latest tech, you could have easily gone down a rabbit hole.
However, no matter where you went, you were bound to hear something about nuclear energy. NEI was fortunate enough to be involved in a handful of panels, and the conversation spilled out onto the convention floor and into the networking cocktail hour.
The week started exactly how you’d want it to start, talking about waste. Really. On Monday morning, NEI was able to participate in a panel called ‘Traditional Nuclear Bottlenecks, Obstacles: Permitting, Waste, and Political Support’. This set the stage nicely for questions and conversations around some of the common misconceptions around nuclear energy. This may have even been a bit of foreshadowing, as just a couple of hours later, a panel of experts from NEI (Marcus Nichol, Hilary Lane, and Christopher Heck) were asked point blank, “What are some of the most common misconceptions around nuclear energy?” They had two key answers that were important for folks to hear (and provided good conversation fodder for me as I walked around the conference):
- Nuclear is safe. A lot of folks think nuclear isn’t safe, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. As Marcus put it, working in nuclear is about as safe as working in a library. A tremendous amount of work and thought goes into ensuring that the folks who work in and live near nuclear plants are perfectly safe.
- Nuclear is clean. In part because of pop culture—think the green goo in The Simpsons—people don’t think that nuclear energy is clean. The fact is that nuclear is clean as can be and saves our atmosphere from more than 470 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions that would otherwise come from fossil fuels.
Nuclear even came up in events focused on completely different things. Whether it was a panel about cleaning up the grid, a conversation about how we can power all the data centers we are expecting to be built in the coming years, or a talk on the environment and national security, nuclear was present.
Getting lost this week would have been easy to do. There were great panels on sustainability in sports with folks from FIFA, booths on how to clean our drains, the legendary Ed Begley Jr., and so much more. No matter where you came from or what you do for work, if you were at this year’s EarthX conference, you were likely there because you want to leave our earth better than you found it. And nuclear is going to play a key part in that.
