Articles by Christopher Mims

Ex-nuclear engineer says it can never be safe

Back when Italy was trying out nuclear power for the first time, Cesare Silvi was one of the guys who had to figure out how to make it safe. Sometimes crazy things would happen -- once, an oil pipe burst, fouling the cooling water intake of a nuclear power plant miles away, shutting it down. Soon Silvi discovered there were many other pipes even closer to that plant; his attempt to study them was stymied by the moneyed interests who own them.

The longer he looked, the more small, improbable, but potentially disastrous scenarios piled up -- war, terrorism, plane crashes, missiles, extreme weather -- leading him to eventually conclude that if you armored a nuclear power plant against all potential disasters, you could never produce power for a reasonable amount of money.

Eliminating soot would save 2.5 million lives a year, slow climate change

“Black carbon," the product of incomplete combustion of everything from wood to diesel fuel, isn’t just something you put on Mary Poppins chimney sweeps to make them look picturesque. It also contributes to climate change, and it will turn your lungs into something from an anti-smoking PSA faster than you can ask for just one more spoonful of sugar. The flip side is that we could save a lot of lives with just a little cleanup.

Your tax dollars subsidize the sh*t out of coal

If you're a fan of a certain dried-leaves-boiled-in-water-related political party, you might believe that renewable energy is the recipient of huge amounts of government largesse, and that the first thing we should do once we get our guy or gal into office is slash all that wasteful spending.

But wait! It turns out coal gets way, way more subsidies for electricity generation.

Is natural gas becoming a cover for the same old dirty fossil fuels industry?

One of the great ironies of the transition to renewable energy is that it's going to require a great deal of fossil fuels to build all those wind turbines, solar panels, and smart grids — because we simply don't have enough renewables already in the mix to bootstrap them up to the level we need […]