‘Crazy’ US-China cooperation on nuclear energy key to tackling climate change, forum hears on Fukushima anniversary

The United States should cooperate with China so that nuclear energy can play a bigger role in decarbonising the world, a forum held on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster has heard.

While this might seem like a “crazy” idea amid tense US-China relations and public scepticism towards nuclear energy, it was common sense given “we will either sink or sail together” in face of carbon emissions-induced climate change whose impact knows no borders, said James Hansen, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute who is famous for his testimony on climate change to US congressional committees in the 1980s.