Provocative piece in the current issue of Wired on how small swaths of the traditionally staunchly anti-nuclear Green movement are starting to go pro-nuke. My earliest awakening of any socio-political thought whatsoever occurred while protesting the construction and launch of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in the early 80s with Mom and Dad. But now:
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.
The “green” arguments in favor of nuclear power are not airtight, but the Wired piece does make a pretty compelling case. Not because nuclear power has become as safe as solar or wind, but because the current hydrocarbon-based situation is so dire.
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.
Not to mention the sheer scale of global energy requirements — to generate the kind of power with solar or wind that can be obtained from a single nuke requires enormous masses of land. Space requirements relative to power sources to produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity:
Nuke: .33 sq. miles
Solar: 60 sq. miles
Wind: 300 sq. miles
Biomass: 1,000 sq. miles
So, yes — if we had put all of the effort and funding over the years into solar that we’ve put into nukes, solar power generation today would be cheaper and more efficient than it is. But I somehow don’t think we would have put that much of a dent in the space requirement problem.
I think I’d be willing to reconsider my stance on nuclear power if we had adequate answers to long-term waste storage problems. Unfortunately, the article pretty much glosses those, focusing instead on the possibilities of recycling spent fuel (which are promising). But until the storage problem is really nailed, there is a problem of conscience. We call the ancient Egyptians “ancient” and they were doing their thing just 5,000 years ago. 100,000 years+ is an almost inconceivably long period of time. It is almost impossible to image us not coming up with a good storage answer somewhere in that span. But it is also unconscionable to start laying this stuff in the ground before we’ve figured it out. It’s our problem, not our childrens’.
