The Biggest Blind Spot of the Climate Movement: Nuclear Energy

Zion Lights used to be deep inside the environmental movement: protests, arrests, road blockades, the whole thing. Then she started looking closely at the evidence around nuclear power and found that much of what she’d been told about energy, risk, and climate solutions didn’t hold up.

In this conversation with Michael Shermer, she explains why anti-nuclear politics has done real damage, and why reliable energy matters far beyond moral posturing. She speaks from experience about Extinction Rebellion, energy policy in Germany and France, fear around Fukushima and Chernobyl, energy poverty, overpopulation, and why modern environmentalism so often attacks the very technologies that could help both people and the planet.

Zion Lights is a British science communicator, writer, author, and former environmental activist known for her pivot to advocacy of evidence-based environmental policy, particularly her support for nuclear energy as a tool for decarbonisation. She is a prominent voice in debates about climate change, energy policy, humanism, and the role of scientific reasoning in public discourse. Her new book is Energy is Life: Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear.