Michael Shellenberger: Why I Changed My Mind About Nuclear Power (Transcript)

Michael Shellenberger

Here is the full transcript of author Michael Shellenberger’s TEDx talk: Why I Changed My Mind About Nuclear Power at TEDxBerlin conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio: Why I changed my mind about nuclear power by Michael Shellenberger at TEDxBerlin

Michael Shellenberger – Author

Like a lot of kids born in the early 70s, I had the good fortune to be raised by hippies. One of my childhood heroes was Stewart Brand.

Stewart is not only one of the originary hippies, he’s also one of the first modern environmentalists of the 1960s and 70s. As a young boy, one of my favorite memories is playing cooperative games that Stewart designed as an antidote to the Vietnam War.

I’m from a long line of Christian pacifists known as Mennonites, and every August, we would go as kids to remember the US government’s atomic bombing of Japan by lighting candles and sending them on boats onto Bittersweet Park.

As I graduated from high school, throughout college, I brought many delegations to Central America to bring diplomacy, seek peace and also to support local farmer cooperatives in Guatemala, Central America and Nicaragua.

And over time, as I’ve traveled all around the world, been through many small communities on all the different continents, I’ve come to appreciate that the young people I interview, they don’t want to be stuck in the village, they don’t want to spend their whole lives chopping wood and hauling wood, they want to go to the city for opportunity – most of them do – for education, for work.