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Environmentalists Coming Around to Nuclear Power?
Heywood J. Blaume writes "In a Washington Post editorial Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, now says he was wrong about opposing nuclear power 30 years ago. In the article he addresses common myths about nuclear power, and puts forth the position that nuclear power is the only feasible, affordable power source that can solve today's growing environmental and energy policy issues. From the article: 'Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.'"
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Patrick Moore is not a modern environmentalist, he is a paid lobbyist for the energy industry.
He consistently presents himself as a "founder of Green Peace"; while he may have been an early member, "founder" is, as far as I can tell, a stretch. It is rather disingenous of him to keep mentioning his now quite distant association with the enviromental movement, without ever mentioning who's paying his salary today.
Mind you, he's welcome to express whatever views he has, and I don't even necessarily disagree about nuclear power. But the news outlets that continue to identify him as "Patric Moore, founder of Greenpeace" instead of "Patrick Moore, Exxon-Mobil shill" need a lesson in journalism.
Greenpeace got too political, so he left to become a lobbyist? Right. He found out what side of the debate paid better.
Instead of just asking "what can we do to pollute less to produce energy", we should ask "what can we do to WASTE less energy?"
I mean, we can have the most efficient power plants in the world and generate only 10% CO2, but if we keep using incandescent lightbulbs, CRT televisions and XTRA-HOT CPU's, i doubt it'll help.
Instead I'd welcome more investment in solar cells, ultra-efficient lighting and low-heat CPU's.
It's interesting/funny to read Patrick Moore describing his former colleague in environmental groups:
Ref: Patrick Moore's Nuclear Statement to the US Congressional Committee
I call bullshit on this one. He clearly has the facts wrong.
The article states that the Chernobyl disaster killed just a few firemen who were fighting the fire. In fact many tens of thousands of people already died or will die of some form of cancer as a consequence of the disaster. For the religious among you: it is estimated that there have been 100000 and 200000 abortions because of Chernobyl.
I read the article because I thought it might offer some sensible views on the topic, but in reality it is just a bad piece of lobbying. I wonder why the editors let this slip into the paper.
where's all that Karma?
No, we don't. The technology is pretty much the same.
Yes we do! It hasn't seen much commercial development (none inside the US) but the Integral Fast Reactor produces waste that only takes about 300 years to return to the original level of radioactivity as the fuel that went into the reactor.
Storing radioactive waste for only 300 years is is many orders of mangitude more feasible than the storage of current waste for tens of thousands of years.
It's called a minivan, it can haul more people, has more cargo room, and on average gets about 50% better fuel economy. Hell I wish Ford hadn't changed the Windstar, with the older model's you can haul 4'x8' sheets of sheet rock and plywood, try that with most SUV's! There is very little justification for a solid framed enclosed truck, for the people who need them I am fine with it, for the other 95 percent I resent their terrorist loving butts.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Global climate change scares me. Not for the usual reasons, but because humans are notoriously bad at "managing" the environment, and I sure hope whatever we come up with to "fix" the problem is not worse than nature's own course.
Granted, we are generating a lot of pollution, and it would be great if we could stop without majorly fucking something else up in the process.
But that last part there has been VERY DIFFICULT for us humans to do.
The chinese curse is alive and well. Whenever I hear the latest global warming scaremongering, I can't help but think of it. "May you live in interesting times." Indeed!
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Nice job of truncating the last paragraph without mentioning it:
"Apparently, the peer review and editing process involved in scientific publication was sufficient to provide a sober view. This episode shows the scientific press in a very good light; and a clear contrast to the lack of any such process in the popular press, then and now."
The article previously described those concerns: that, *excluding* anthropogenic alterations, which they *specifically stated that they could not model well at the time* (quite the contrast to the present, where the papers state that we *can* model quite accurately**), there would be another ice age in *tens of thousands of years*.
How did you read the article and miss all of that?
** - If you want to get into a debate over present day climate modelling, go ahead and light the match. After watching a long presentation by the director of NCAR (Tim Killeen) and speaking with him at length afterwards, I'd be more than happy to discuss this with you. We can start with the fact that present day computing per dollar buys you about one million times as much computing power, progress into the fact that the amount of funding available for that computing has skyrocketted (their advancing computing needs easily beat Moore's law), and continue into the details of the climate models (datapoints every county or two, collecting data down to how dust lifted off the Sahara affects algal blooms) and the verification of the models.
The Spanish-English dictionary is out of ink.
Unfortunately nuclear energy might be the only viable short term solution. There is no way China, Europe or the US will cut their energy consumption to reasonable levels (reasonable as in all the world's population could use the same lever per capita and the world would not melt or blow to pieces like Melmac when they all turned on their hair dryers at the same time). Sustainable energy sources like wind and water energy can't cover the demand. And coal and oil just add too much CO2 to the atmosphere. So we are left with no choice (until we get fusion, cold or hot) but fission.
But please don't get all excited about it. There seem to be accidents in Japanese plants on a regular basis. Pebble reactors are fine, until you count in terrorism. Uranium is also a limited resource. We produce waste. And even if we refurbish the waste (and take care of the last two points) it still produces waste and it will still run out at some point.
There are new studies coming out every month that either radiation from power plants does or does not make a difference in cancer rates. Until we have that figured out we are still in doubt about that one. So I count that as not being very excited about the prospect of nuclear energy.
But you guys are right about one thing. People need to realize that nuclear energy IS the least worse choice out there now. I come from Germany and it is not possible to build power plants here for political reasons. Nobody will! This is rediculous.