The Salt Lake Tribune’s recent editorial on Gov. Spencer Cox’s nuclear energy initiatives claims to approach the issue with “equal measures of hope and suspicion.” Unfortunately, it dedicates far more space to the latter. It serves only to hamstring Utah’s pursuit of an affordable, reliable, and clean future with its embarrassing lack of awareness and thought.
The editorial’s first and chief sin is its suggestion that Gov. Cox is unaware of the targeted renewable project cancellations by President Trump. Incredibly, The Tribune links as evidence of this to a CNN report about a cancelled solar project in which Gov. Cox is directly referenced defending that very solar farm. In fact, Cox took to Twitter declaring, “This is how we lose the AI/energy arms race with China.” Print readers will be unaware of The Tribune’s poor reading of its own sources.
The editorial’s core stance — the perpetual “just asking questions” approach to nuclear power — is a classic example of the nirvana fallacy. They criticize a pathway because it is imperfect while ignoring the ongoing problems of the status quo.
Disappointing again is The Tribune’s attempt to link modern, nuclear energy to the painful legacy of the downwinders and nuclear weapons. This comparison is not merely flawed; it is a profound failure of context. It conflates the Cold War-era development of nuclear weapons with the highly regulated, safety-focused generation of nuclear power. It is akin to criticizing butter knives because their steel can be melted down into bayonets. Our energy future deserves better than such fear-mongering.
The issue of nuclear waste is similarly distorted in the editorial. To put waste in perspective: the entirety of a single person’s lifetime energy consumption, if provided by nuclear power, results in waste about the size of a coffee cup. All the commercial nuclear waste since 1950, the Department of Energy wrote during President Biden’s administration, could fit on a football field and not reach the 10-yard line. Furthermore, advanced reactor designs and recycling technologies are rapidly transforming waste from a storage problem into a valuable fuel source.
We need vast power to feed a rapidly electrifying world alongside new American industries. Every Utahn should embrace the proactive optimism embodied in efforts like the prototyping and testing of 11 reactors just up the road at the Idaho National Laboratory, and the ways that Utah is leading the next stage of nuclear’s American story. The Tribune should join in — rather than continue to jeer from the sidelines.
At the very least, the paper should read the sources it cites and take its own advice when insisting, as they say in the editorial, “We need to go fully trust-but-verify.”
Josh T. Smith, energy policy lead at the Abundance Institute, Logan
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