Only nuclear power can now halt global warming

[John_Sukosky@DOM.COM]

Maybe this will cause reasonable people to re-think an unreasonable

position they may hold on nuclear power:



http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=524313



Leading environmentalist urges radical rethink on climate change

By Michael McCarthy Environment Editor

24 May 2004





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.



He believes only a massive expansion of nuclear power, which produces

almost no CO2, can now check a runaway warming which would raise sea levels

disastrously around the world, cause climatic turbulence and make

agriculture unviable over large areas. He says fears about the safety of

nuclear energy are irrational and exaggerated, and urges the Green movement

to drop its opposition.



In today's Independent, Professor Lovelock says he is concerned by two

climatic events in particular: the melting of the Greenland ice sheet,

which will raise global sea levels significantly, and the episode of

extreme heat in western central Europe last August, accepted by many

scientists as unprecedented and a direct result of global warming.



These are ominous warning signs, he says, that climate change is speeding,

but many people are still in ignorance of this. Important among the reasons

is "the denial of climate change in the US, where governments have failed

to give their climate scientists the support they needed".



He compares the situation to that in Europe in 1938, with the Second World

War looming, and nobody knowing what to do. The attachment of the Greens to

renewables is "well-intentioned but misguided", he says, like the Left's

1938 attachment to disarmament when he too was a left-winger.



He writes today: "I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to

drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy."



His appeal, which in effect is asking the Greens to make a bargain with the

devil, is likely to fall on deaf ears, at least at present.



"Lovelock is right to demand a drastic response to climate change," Stephen

Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said last night. "He's right

to question previous assumptions.



"But he's wrong to think nuclear power is any part of the answer. Nuclear

creates enormous problems, waste we don't know what to do with; radioactive

emissions; unavoidable risk of accident and terrorist attack."



Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, said: "Climate change and

radioactive waste both pose deadly long-term threats, and we have a moral

duty to minimise the effects of both, not to choose between them."





John M. Sukosky, CHP

Dominion

Surry Power Station

(757)-365-2594 (Tieline: 8-798-2594)



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