Zion Lights is a UK-based environmentalist, a former spokesperson for the protest group Extinction Rebellion who changed her views on what it means to go nuclear.
Six years ago, she pivoted from campaigning against nuclear energy as an environmental issue. and instead started advocating nuclear uptake as an environmental solution.
At the time it was a quite radical transformation, from Extinction Rebellion spokesperson to pro-nuclear advocate, attracting all kinds of hate mail from her former colleagues and collaborators.
In this episode of the Commercial Disco, Ms Lights talks about the changing attitudes to nuclear energy across the world. Global unrest, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and the energy price spikes have forced a rethink.
Such a pivot to nuclear energy is not so radical today. There are a growing number of environmentalists who have also made the pivot to nuclear energy on the basis of climate change and decarbonisation.
And the politics have changed as a result. Nuclear energy is still a contested debate, but the discussion has opened up dramatically – particularly in Europe, but in different parts of the US as well.
“Now you’ve got European countries saying they made a mistake, Germany saying we made a mistake, [that] we shouldn’t have shut nuclear,” Ms Lights said. “Other countries are suddenly becoming bullish on nuclear, like Poland.”
“So the shift has been remarkable… I think what happened is we set the foundation for acceptance, and then when the energy crisis hit us, it gave people permission to revisit nuclear, also to think about energy in a different way.”
“And it’s always younger people, always it’s always Gen Z. I think it’s harder to bring some of the older generation along. They have a lot more fears around weapons and things like that.
“The younger generation is more worried about more realistic things like jobs and the economy and clean energy and the environment and climate change – especially climate change.”
This is a fascinating interview that maps the changing attitudes toward nuclear and renewables across Europe and the US, and the political and technological forces that is driving this change.
Australia is perplexing on nuclear, she says. The 30-year moratorium on nuclear energy has created attitudes to nuclear that are out of step with contemporary economies.
The idea that Australia is seeking to attract large scale data centre providers based entirely on renewables is something no other country in the world is talking about.
“I don’t see how Australia can do it if you’re shutting down coal. If you keep coal, then yes, you could do it. But if you’re shutting that down… I don’t understand how you could power an entire country and additional energy intensive technologies like data centers with only a wind and solar grid,” Ms Light said.
“It will be interesting to see what happens there, but it will be real shame if you end up going back to coal, because I think there’s an opportunity to have that debate about other energy sources.”
There is a hardness to attitudes to nuclear that make open conversations difficult, she says.
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