Don’t Miss Gwyneth Cravens at CNA2014

By Romeo St-Martin
Digital Media Officer
Canadian Nuclear Association

Gwyneth Cravens is an American writer, environmentalist, and recent co-star of Pandora’s Promise.

To date, she has published five novels and has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

She grew up in 1950s New Mexico having atom-bomb nightmares.

She became a sometime anti-nuclear activist, who supported initiatives to prevent the Shoreham nuclear power plant from being completed on Long Island, where she lives.

About 10 years ago, Cravens changed her views on nuclear power after discussions with Dr. D. Richard (“Rip”) Anderson, a chemist, oceanographer, and international expert in nuclear risk assessment.

“I began to think about the risks of our energy sources more clearly and to examine my own prejudices that had led me to oppose the only large-scale source that we can expand in this country – nuclear power,” she said.

“I had certain impressions and prejudices, some of them fostered by activists at Greenpeace, and I just assumed that nuclear power had to be the deadliest form of energy production. That was my assumption, that was my prejudice and I began to learn differently.

“One of the problems in supporting these prejudices is getting information from sources that are not science-based. That are not reliable. That are ideologically-based.”

The Wall street Journal called her latest book, The Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy, “as good a book as we’re likely to get on a subject mired in political incorrectness, general unfathomability and essentially limitless gut fears.”

Released in October 2007, it argues for nuclear power as a safe energy source and an essential preventive of global warming.

“If we don’t have more nuclear power we are going to have more greenhouse gases. That’s just how it is,” said Cravens.

Gwyneth Cravens will be speaking at CNA2014 this month.