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[BRIEF NOTE] The Need for Nuclear Power
May. 24th, 2004 12:45 amFrom The Independent, the article "'Only nuclear power can now halt global warming': Leading environmentalist urges radical rethink on climate change," by Michael McCarthy:
Lovelock is quite right. Given growing power consumption--not only in the developed world, but in up-and-coming middle income countries and Third World giants like China--there's simply no way that windmills, or tidal energy, or solar power, or all of these combined and more can accomodate demands for energy. Besides, there's reason to suspect that large-scale projects to exploit renewable energy resources would cause significant ecological damage. A tidal barrage draped across the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, for example, would generate huge amounts of power, but it would also wreak havoc.
Certainly, with a growing dependency on nuclear power generation the danger from radioactive pollution grows; but then, burning coal and oil causes at least as much harm to human health as radioactive pollution, even excluding the greenhouse effect. (Remember the killer smog of London in 1952? And don't forget that lung cancer is triggered by all kinds of smoke, not just cigarette smoke.) Chernobyl wasn't the inevitable outcome of nuclear power; rather, it was the inevitable outcome of a Soviet nuclear power program that made no room for safety, or common sense.
No. If the 21st century is to be an environmentalist century, it will have to be a nuclear one.
Global warming is now advancing so swiftly that only a massive expansion of nuclear power as the world's main energy source can prevent it overwhelming civilisation, the scientist and celebrated Green guru, James Lovelock, says.
His call will cause huge disquiet for the environmental movement. It has long considered the 84-year-old radical thinker among its greatest heroes, and sees climate change as the most important issue facing the world, but it has always regarded opposition to nuclear power as an article of faith. Last night the leaders of both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth rejected his call.
Professor Lovelock, who achieved international fame as the author of the Gaia hypothesis, the theory that the Earth keeps itself fit for life by the actions of living things themselves, was among the first researchers to sound the alarm about the threat from the greenhouse effect.
He was in a select group of scientists who gave an initial briefing on climate change to Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Cabinet at 10 Downing Street in April 1989.
He now believes recent climatic events have shown the warming of the atmosphere is proceeding even more rapidly than the scientists of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thought it would, in their last report in 2001.
On that basis, he says, there is simply not enough time for renewable energy, such as wind, wave and solar power - the favoured solution of the Green movement - to take the place of the coal, gas and oil-fired power stations whose waste gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), is causing the atmosphere to warm.
Lovelock is quite right. Given growing power consumption--not only in the developed world, but in up-and-coming middle income countries and Third World giants like China--there's simply no way that windmills, or tidal energy, or solar power, or all of these combined and more can accomodate demands for energy. Besides, there's reason to suspect that large-scale projects to exploit renewable energy resources would cause significant ecological damage. A tidal barrage draped across the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, for example, would generate huge amounts of power, but it would also wreak havoc.
Certainly, with a growing dependency on nuclear power generation the danger from radioactive pollution grows; but then, burning coal and oil causes at least as much harm to human health as radioactive pollution, even excluding the greenhouse effect. (Remember the killer smog of London in 1952? And don't forget that lung cancer is triggered by all kinds of smoke, not just cigarette smoke.) Chernobyl wasn't the inevitable outcome of nuclear power; rather, it was the inevitable outcome of a Soviet nuclear power program that made no room for safety, or common sense.
No. If the 21st century is to be an environmentalist century, it will have to be a nuclear one.
