They want to revive momentum for scientific and political breakthroughs on waste that stalled after the accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, which raised worldwide fears about radioactivity's risks to human and planetary health.
But a power shift like this cannot take place without a power shift of another kind: we need a government which fears planetary meltdown more than it fears the CBI.
The fear is that discussion of planetary overburden will lead to a weakening of the Church's position on birth control and abortion.
Spraying sun-reflecting chemicals into the atmosphere, mimicking volcanoes, blocking sunlight and fertilising the oceans with iron filings attracts people who think that technology has all the answers, but it should strike fear into most of the world, which has not been responsible for warming and which has no reason to trust politicians' or scientists' further meddling with planetary forces.
Central to the proceedings was an undercurrent of elite fear that the increasing disenfranchisement of the vast majority of the planetary population under decades of capitalist business-as-usual could well be its own undoing.
We are now at a critical juncture, a tipping point, where overstepping our planetary boundaries is leading us down a path to growing instability, resource scarcity, fear, crisis and potential conflict.
But whereas the science-fiction projections of the '50s tended to focus on the threat of alien invasion and planetary destruction, and to give expression to a panoply of cold war fears, "Star Trek" celebrated humanism, problem solving and curiosity.
"This is not an attempt to cover anything up," said planetary scientist Donald K. Yeomans at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose orbital calculations in March helped dispel the fear that Earth was on a collision course with asteroid 1997FX11.
Believing planetary limits have been dreamt up to frighten us, he insists: "There is an alternative to fear".
Marsden, who was once called "a cheery herald of fear" by the New York Times, also played a key role in the demotion of Pluto from major to minor planetary status, which also gained him a certain amount of infamy.
