An article in Wired points to an emerging realisation that nuclear power might be the best alternative to the current conventional sources of power, in this era of increasing global warming and climate change.
Believe it or not, a coal-fired plant releases 100 times more radioactive material than an equivalent nuclear reactor - right into the air, too, not into some carefully guarded storage site. Burning hydrocarbons is a luxury that a planet with 6 billion energy-hungry souls can't afford. There's only one sane, practical alternative: nuclear power.
We now know that the risks of splitting atoms pale beside the dreadful toll exacted by fossil fuels. Radiation containment, waste disposal, and nuclear weapons proliferation are manageable problems in a way that global warming is not. Unlike the usual green alternatives - water, wind, solar, and biomass - nuclear energy is here, now, in industrial quantities. Sure, nuke plants are expensive to build - upward of $2 billion apiece - but they start to look cheap when you factor in the true cost to people and the planet of burning fossil fuels. And nuclear is our best hope for cleanly and efficiently generating hydrogen, which would end our other ugly hydrocarbon addiction - dependence on gasoline and diesel for transport.
The articles points to prominent greens who have changed their mind about nuclear power,
Some of the world's most thoughtful greens have discovered the logic of nuclear power, including Gaia theorist James Lovelock, Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore, and Britain's Bishop Hugh Montefiore, a longtime board member of Friends of the Earth
but also adds later that these people haven't been able to influence the organisations they were part of to agree with their own changing views.
From Greenpeace to the Green Party, some of the most prominent environmental groups today made their reputations in the 1970s as opponents of nuclear power. So it was no wonder that greens were vexed last summer when prime minister Tony Blair proposed a new generation of nuclear power plants for Britain to confront the problem of climate change. But what galled them even more was the response to Blair from Hugh Montefiore, a former Anglican bishop and longtime trustee of Friends of the Earth. Writing in the British journal The Tablet in October, Montefiore committed what colleagues viewed as the ultimate betrayal: "I have now come to the conclusion that the solution [to global warming] is to make more use of nuclear energy." When Montefiore told fellow trustees that he planned to speak out, they made him resign his post.
Montefiore isn't the only dyed-in-the-wool green who has been exiled for advocating nuclear power. Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore left the organization after embracing atomic energy. British biologist James Lovelock, whose Gaia theory was an environmental watchword before he turned pro-nuke, is now persona non grata within the movement. "There are members of my former organization who would agree with me but have not gone public about the matter," Montefiore laments. "If only we had a few more people who would stick their necks out, it would help."
Nuclear power may have been ahead of its time when it emerged in the second half of the 20th century, at a time when the effects of conventional sources of power hadn't yet been acutely felt, but there seems to be an emerging realisation that its time may have come.
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