Environmental Visionaries: The Nuclear Revivalist
For environmentalist Jesse Ausubel, going green means land conservation and energy efficiency-and forgetting "boutique" renewables like windmills and biofuels It's 2070. You're on a train from New York to Boston. If you could see outside, it would be mostly open landscape. Maybe a nuclear plant or two, but otherwise green space-none of the urban sprawl, wind farms, solar arrays or biomass operations we've been taught to expect from an ecologically responsible future. But you can't see outside, because you're underground, traveling 300 miles an hour on a maglev train alongside superconducting pipes transporting the energy from those nuclear plants. This is 2070 as Jesse Ausubel sees it, anyway, and his vision-a brazenly pragmatic one that puts land conservation and energy efficiency above all else-isn't making him a lot of friends in the environmental movement. "Some of my colleagues have put forth what are called green or renewable solutions or technologies, and they're...