From the UK Independent:
Scientist's plea to use nuclear energy starts new climate change
debate by green groups
By Charles Arthur Technology Editor
25 May 2004
A former Labour energy minister and the nuclear industry both welcomed
the call by the scientist James Lovelock yesterday for a massive
expansion of the nuclear industry to combat global warming.
They also forecast that Professor Lovelock's dramatic call, in
yesterday's Independent, would force more environmentalists to
consider whether nuclear power really posed a greater threat to
humanity than climate change - and that they too would eventually
agree with the celebrated scientist.
Professor Lovelock's radical suggestion provoked widespread debate
yesterday, with both Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace rejecting his
claims.
However Brian Wilson, who stood down as energy minister last year to
become the Prime Minister's special representative on overseas trade,
said Professor Lovelock had had the courage to address the question of
global warming honestly. "I hope that many others will follow him in
questioning the basis of their hostility to nuclear power in the age
of global warming."
Mr Wilson said it was "a self-evident nonsense" for the UK to run down
its nuclear capacity at the same time that there was an unprecedented
emphasis on the need to reduce carbon emissions.
"Nuclear power is our only significant source of non-carbon
electricity. It is the bird in the hand yet the Green lobby wants to
shoot it."
At the Nuclear Industry Association, which lobbies in favour of
nuclear power, Simon James said: "It's self-evident to us that nuclear
power can deliver large amounts of energy without producing the carbon
dioxide that contributes to global warming.
"We believe we are winning the argument. Increasingly people are
looking at this and saying 'Hang on, if we're serious about global
warming we need to do something serious about converting large amounts
of energy to non-carbon-producing sources.
"Environmentalists are seeing this. I wouldn't be at all surprised if
this article means more environmentalists come out backing Professor
Lovelock," Mr James said.
As the creator of the Gaia hypothesis - which suggests that the Earth
acts as a single organism - Professor Lovelock, 84, has a mythic place
in the Green movement.
But in yesterday's Independent he argued that a massive expansion of
nuclear power as the world's main energy source is necessary to
prevent climate change overwhelming civilisation in the next 50 years.
Some environmentalists see that as a dramatic volte-face, because
nuclear fission produces radioactive waste that remains dangerous for
thousands of years and requires special storage and disposal.
Environmental groups have thus lobbied - and frequently acted -
against nuclear power wherever possible.
However, a growing number of scientific bodies, including most
recently the Royal Academy of Engineering, have concluded that nuclear
power does represent the best compromise between risk and power
output, given the world's growing demand for energy.
In his article calling for a fresh look at nuclear power, Professor
Lovelock considers - and rejects - other options for generating power
and criticises the Green movement's rejection of it. He also accuses
the group of forgetting the lesson of the Gaia concept.
"Every year that we continue burning carbon makes it worse for our
descendants and for civilisation ... The Green lobbies, which should
have given priority to global warming, seem more concerned about
threats to people than with threats to Earth, not noticing that we are
part of the Earth and wholly dependent upon its well-being."
Public attention to global warming and climate change has been
heightened by Sir David King, the Government's chief scientist, who
has repeatedly said that global warming poses a greater threat to the
world than terrorism.
A new Hollywood blockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow, also uses
dramatic effects of global warming as the essence of its plot - a move
that environmentalists have said should raise the importance of the
topic in people's consciousness. |
