Sometimes, in the realms of political and social activism, one encounters a seeming contradiction. Here's the thing: As long ago as ancient Greece, when Aristotle was putting his laws of logic down on parchment, people knew that in the realm of factual discourse, contradictions do not exist. No two assertions of fact can contradict each other, and both be true. Check your presumptions, check the facts, and one of the assertions will always be false.
Case in point: The climate scolds, the people who make a career of shouting about the need to curtail our carbon emissions to prevent our planet from actually bursting into flame (OK, that's a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one), claim to want clean, emissions-free energy. Now, no energy is truly emissions-free, but let's set that aside for the moment. The scolds shout about the need for more eagle-killing windmills and bird-cooking solar panels, while refusing to consider the one clean energy source, low-emissions, and unlike the others, has high energy density and is reliable: Nuclear power.
Why? Well, we'll get into that. But first, the good news: The side of reality is starting to chalk up wins, most notably with the approval of the country's first new nuclear reactor in over a decade. And there's a surprising name involved.
On March 4, 2026, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission unanimously approved construction of America’s first new commercial nuclear reactor in nearly a decade. TerraPower — founded by Bill Gates — will build a 345-megawatt sodium-cooled reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming, on the site of a former coal plant. Construction begins within weeks. The reactor is expected to be online by 2030.
Gates said he wished he could deliver it three years earlier. “Then we’d have a perfect match to the current demand pattern of these data center guys,” he said. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are racing to secure nuclear power for AI infrastructure. The private sector has arrived at the conclusion that the environmental movement spent fifty years preventing the public from reaching: nuclear is the answer.
The Union of Concerned Scientists’ response was immediate. They called the Kemmerer plant a “Cowboy Chernobyl.” They accused the NRC of a “rushed” approval. They warned of liquid sodium fires, uncontrolled power excursions, and inadequate containment.
Come on, climate scolds; when you've lost Bill Gates, you're losing bad. Data centers, a new technology being super-charged by the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), are driving this new focus on nuclear power. And new reactor designs are making nuclear fission reactors for electrical generation safer and more reliable than ever. But here's the thing: We have had a stunningly good example of how safe and reliable nuclear fission reactors can be, and have had such examples for over half a century: They are parked in major ports every day, as well as plying the world's oceans.
Right now, nuclear reactors are docked in American cities.
Norfolk. San Diego. Pearl Harbor. Bremerton. U.S. Navy aircraft carriers sit at these piers while sailors come and go, families live nearby, and tourists take photos. In 70 years of operation, these reactors have never had an accident. Not one.
The U.S. Navy has operated 219 nuclear-powered ships, accumulated 6,900+ reactor-years of operation, and visited ports in over 50 countries. Reactor accidents: zero. Radiation deaths: zero. Environmental damage: zero.
So here’s the question every climate activist needs to answer: if the government considers nuclear reactors safe enough to dock next to downtown San Diego, why did your movement spend five decades making sure we couldn’t build them to power our cities?
Ay, that's the rub - and there's that contradiction.
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Contradictions don't exist. Not when one is talking facts. Aristotle knew this and stated as much in the Law of Non-Contradiction:
For any given proposition, the proposition and its negation cannot both be simultaneously true.
In this case, the people who are designing and building nuclear power plants are asserting that these plants are safe and reliable. The people who oppose them are claiming they are unsafe. Both cannot simultaneously be true, but fortunately, we have over 70 years of evidence showing that fission reactors are, by and large, safe and reliable; just ask any of the officers and men on any of our Navy's many nuclear-powered ships and submarines.
So why are the climate scolds continuing to oppose nuclear power at every turn? Let's check the premises: If you accept the premise that the scolds maintain, that they are concerned with the safety and reliability of nuclear power, then you run across the contradictory facts: Evidence overwhelmingly shows that nuclear fission plants are safe and reliable. But if you adopt as your premise that the climate scolds, exclusively creatures of the political left, are not concerned with safe, reliable power but rather with control, then the seeming contradiction is explained.
It all comes clear, doesn't it? It's about control. It's always about control. That's how the left has always operated. That's how the left will always operate. And that's how we will always beat them - with facts.
