If more countries had adopted nuclear power in the 1970s, perhaps we wouldn’t be worrying about climate change now
This scenario is set in a different 2020 from the one we now inhabit, on a timeline that diverged in 1974a date that means much to most people. But hindsight suggests that March 6th 1974 may have been a turning-point in human history. The decision announced on that day by Pierre Messmer, France’s prime minister, may have saved the world from a dangerous rise in temperatures—an obscure phenomenon known in scientific circles as “global warming”.
In other circumstances, that decision might have proved just one more example of France’s desire to be different. Though nuclear power had looked promising in the 1950s, and most industrialised countries had built at least one experimental reactor, progress was unsteady in the 1960s as some people conflated atomic energy with nuclear weapons.
Nervousness about countries using civil programmes to acquire the plutonium needed for bombmaking was soon put to rest. The technical breakthrough that overcame this objection, and paved the way for nu-power’s ubiquity, came from an unexpected quarter: India. In 1985 the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai announced that it had built a successful thorium reactor. Not only is thorium three times more abundant than the uranium previously used to power reactors, it is much harder to weaponise.
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