In the wake of Joe Manchin’s back stabbing of his fellow Democrats this week, an attempt to keep West Virginia comfortably in the Nineteenth Century, I felt the need to offer a realistic approach for the environmental cause going forward. In short, we need to move forward aggressively in the nuclear energy sector soon if we have any hope of staving off climate change.

Unfortunately like almost everything in the world of public policy, this point of view is not perfect, but is a lesser evil much in the way that Hillary was in 2016. If that didn’t rattle the cages of the ideological purists who squeamishly voted for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, enjoy your Supreme Court Justices for the next thirty years you bunch of simpletons.

The United States currently has fifty-five nuclear power plants with an average age of around forty years old, the most recent came online in twenty-sixteen. The fact is that nuclear power can provide a clean, stable source of energy for all the time that the sun isn’t shining on solar panels or wind isn’t propelling turbines.

Nuclear is the answer to how we power all the electric vehicles in the future, and move away from the most environmentally catastrophic sources of energy like coal, oil and natural gas. All of those batteries aren’t going to charge themselves, and a well regulated nuclear industry can be the bridge to our energy future as well as lower dependence on foreign sources.

Back to the purists, nuclear energy is not risk free, but significant progress has been made. Let’s take a look at three of the most commonly cited nuclear disasters: Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island. The Chernobyl disaster was a result primarily of misplaced Soviet bravado, and extremely short sighted cost cutting measures in the construction and composition of the plant that compromised safety. In addition there was a near complete lack of damage mitigation structure around the reactor.

With Fukushima, simply put, Japan never should have been in the nuclear business. The risk factors of being located on a major fault line that has repeatedly experienced major earthquakes, and susceptibility to tsunamis on the coast which ultimately caused the plant to fail and melt down should have been foreseen long before construction.

Three Mile Island was not as significant of a disaster as the aforementioned, but was in the United States. Though a relief valve failed and caused a partial meltdown of the reactor core, the concrete protective structure around the core prevented a much more serious radioactive event from taking place. Better regulation and safety procedures may have prevented the event, but the worst was avoided.

Building well regulated, modern nuclear facilities in areas statistically safe from natural disasters could prove to be a palatable comprise between the fossil fuel addicted right and the green obsessed left. I would even suggest using eminent domain to build facilities in areas that fit that criteria, here’s looking at you Dakotas.