Former Greenpeace Co-Founder Exposes 'Pop-Environmentalism' as the Root of Climate Change Hysteria, While Calmly Discussing Virtues of Nuclear Energy

http://www.newsweek.com/id/131753

A Renegade Against Greenpeace: Why he says they're wrong to view nuclear energy as 'evil'


Fareed Zakaria


NEWSWEEK


Apr 12, 2008


Patrick Moore is a critic of the environmental movement—an unlikely one at that. He was one of the cofounders of Greenpeace, and sailed into the Aleutian Islands on the organization's inaugural mission in 1971, to protest U.S. nuclear tests taking place there.


After leading the group for 15 years he left abruptly, and, in a controversial reversal, has become an outspoken advocate of some of the environmental movement's most detested causes, chief among them nuclear energy.


NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria spoke to Moore about his sparring with the green movement, and why he thinks nuclear power is the energy of the future.


Excerpts:


ZAKARIA: At Greenpeace, you fought against nuclear energy. What changed?


MOORE: My belief, in retrospect, is that because we were so focused on the destructive aspect of nuclear technology and nuclear war, we made the mistake of lumping nuclear energy in with nuclear weapons, as if all things nuclear were evil. And indeed today, Greenpeace still uses the word "evil" to describe nuclear energy. I think that's as big a mistake as if you lumped nuclear medicine in with nuclear weapons. Nuclear medicine uses radioactive isotopes to successfully treat millions of people every year, and those isotopes are all produced in nuclear reactors.

That's why I left Greenpeace: I could see that my fellow directors, none of whom had any science education, were starting to deal with issues around chemicals and biology and genetics, which they had no formal training in, and they were taking the organization into what I call "pop environmentalism," which uses sensationalism, misinformation, fear tactics, etc., to deal with people on an emotional level rather than an intellectual level.


Why do you favor nuclear energy over other non-carbon-based sources of energy?


Other than hydroelectric energy—which I also strongly support—nuclear is the only technology besides fossil fuels available as a large-scale continuous power source, and I mean one you can rely on to be running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Wind and solar energy are intermittent and thus unreliable. How can you run hospitals and factories and schools and even a house on an electricity supply that disappears for three or four days at a time? Wind can play a minor role in reducing the amount of fossil fuels we use, because you can turn the fossil fuels off when the wind is blowing. And solar is completely ridiculous. The cost is so high—California's $3.2 billion in solar subsidies is all just going into Silicon Valley companies and consultants. It's ridiculous.


A number of analyses say that nuclear power isn't cost competitive, and that without government subsidies, there's no real market for it.


That's simply not true. Where the massive government subsidies are is in wind and solar. I know that France, which produces 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear, does not have high energy costs. Sweden, which produces 50 percent of its energy with nuclear and 50 percent with hydro, has very reasonable energy costs. I know that the cost of production of electricity among the 104 nuclear plants operating in the United States is 1.68 cents per kilowatt-hour. That's not including the capital costs, but the cost of production of electricity from nuclear is very low, and competitive with dirty coal. Gas costs three times as much as nuclear, at least. Wind costs five times as much, and solar costs 10 times as much.


What about the issue of nuclear waste?


As is now planned, I'd establish a recycling industry for nuclear fuel, which reduces the amount of waste to less than 10 percent of what it would be without recycling. How many Americans know that 50 percent of the nuclear energy being produced in the U.S. is now coming from dismantled Russian nuclear warheads?


The environmental movement is going on about how terrible it will be if someone does something destructive with these materials. Well, actually the opposite is occurring: all over the world, people are using former nuclear-weapons material for peaceful purposes—swords into plowshares. This constant propaganda about the cost of nuclear energy—that's just activists looking for the right buttons to push, and one of the key buttons to push is to make consumers afraid that their electricity prices will go up if nuclear energy is built. In fact, it's natural gas that is causing [energy] prices to go up.


Don't you worry about proliferation?


You do not need a nuclear reactor to make a nuclear weapon. With centrifuge technology, it is far easier, quicker and cheaper to make a nuclear weapon by enriching uranium directly. No nuclear reactor was involved in making the Hiroshima bomb. You'll never change the fact that there are evil people in the world. The most deaths in combat in the last 20 years have not been caused by nuclear weapons or car bombs or rifles or land mines or any of the usual suspects, but the machete. And yet the machete is the most important tool for farmers in the developing world. Hundreds of millions of people use it to clear their land, to cut their firewood and harvest their crops. Banning the machete is not an option.


Are you optimistic that there will be an aggressive move toward nuclear power in the industrial world, and in particular in the United States?


There are 32 nuclear plants on the drawing boards right now. Last year four applied for their licenses and this year we expect 10 or 11 more. That's just in the United States. There are hundreds of nuclear plants on the drawing boards around the world. This is a completely new thing: the term "'nuclear renaissance" didn't exist three years ago, and now it's a widely known term. Unfortunately, the environmental movement now is the primary obstacle here. If it weren't for their opposition to nuclear energy, there would be a lot fewer coal-fired power plants in the United States and other parts of the world today.

Democrats Pander to Environmental Extremists and Foresake the Ultimate Form of Renewable Energy - Recyclable Spent Nuclear Fuel Rods

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=285465316288156


Nuclear Fuel: Waste Not, Want Not


INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY


January 17, 2008


Power: On the eve of the Nevada caucus, Democrats fall over each another opposing storage of the nation's nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain Repository. But is it really waste or the ultimate form of renewable energy?


At a debate Tuesday, the Democrats' three blind mice were asked if they would kill the nuclear waste repository project at Yucca Mountain 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas. All said they would, demonstrating once again their party's energy policy consists mainly of hot air from the podium.


An underground train enters Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Democratic opposition has delayed plans to turn the site into a nuclear waste dump.


Trial lawyer and one-term senator John Edwards added that he was not only against Yucca Mountain but against nuclear power altogether. "I am against building more nuclear power plants because I do not think we have a safe way to dispose of the waste," he said.


Except that Edwards doesn't mind keeping America's nuclear waste where it is right now — in everybody else's back yard.


Vast numbers of spent nuclear fuel rods are currently being stored at more than 130 above-ground facilities in 39 states. Approximately 161 million Americans live within 75 miles of these existing sites. Each is a terrorist's dream target.


Sen. Barack Obama said he'd "end the notion of Yucca Mountain because it has not been based on the sort of sound science that can assure the people of Nevada that they're going to be safe."


The fact that his home state of Illinois has more nuclear plants than any other, he said, made it all the more noble that he has stood against the project.


Noble? The closed nuclear power plant at Zion, just north of Chicago and 120 yards from Lake Michigan, holds 2.7 million pounds of spent fuel rods. Nearly 4,500 metric tons of nuclear waste in Illinois awaits permanent storage. Obama thinks it's just fine the way it is.


As for Sen. Hillary Clinton, she said she's been "consistently against Yucca Mountain." And indeed she has.


"Yucca Mountain is not a safe place to store spent fuel from our nation's nuclear reactors," she stated at a Senate hearing in October. In her response to a Las Vegas Sun questionnaire, Hillary said: "I'm working with (Nevada senator) Harry Reid to starve it to death."


Yucca Mountain is possibly the safest, most geologically stable and most studied place on the planet. It abuts Nellis Air Force Base and the Nevada Test Site. Even if terrorists managed to penetrate repository security and the mountain itself, the worst-case scenario might be a mild release of radioactivity in the middle of a desert, not a death cloud descending on a major metropolitan area.


The storage facility is supposed to hold 77,000 tons of nuclear waste for thousands of years in a single secure site. Yucca Mountain would be the solution offered by Mark Twain's Puddn'head Wilson: "Put all your eggs in one basket and — watch that basket."


But there may be an even better solution: Recycle spent fuel rods to produce even more greenhouse-gas-reducing nuclear energy.


Over the past four decades, America's reactors have produced about 56,000 tons of used fuel. Jack Spencer, research fellow for nuclear energy policy at the Thomas A. Rowe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, says this "waste" has enough energy to power every U.S. household for a dozen years.


As we've noted, France long ago achieved energy independence by relying on nuclear energy for most of its power needs. But it also leads the world in processing this waste to create even more energy.


The French have reprocessed spent nuclear fuel for 30 years without incident. There have been no accidental explosions, no terrorist attacks, no contribution to nuclear proliferation. Their facility in La Hague has safely processed more than 23,000 tons of spent fuel, or enough to power the entire country for 14 years.


The U.S. pioneered the technology to recapture that energy decades ago, then banned its commercial use in 1977. An energy plan that does not involve continued and even increased use of nuclear power is no plan at all. And even if we closed all nuclear plants tomorrow, the waste problem would remain.


Power to the people — nuclear power.

UK Government: There is NO Policy Reason to Deny Energy Companies From Investing in New Nuclear Power Stations

Notwithstanding the global warming/climate change hysteria wrought by extremist environmental groups in the UK and throughout the European Continent, the UK Government appears to have arrived at a rationale and reasonable risk management approach to ensuring UK energy security for the foreseeable future (next 50 years).


The UK government, as stated in its January 2008 document "Meeting the energy challenge: a White Paper on nuclear power" (http://www.berr.gov.uk/energy/nuclear-whitepaper/page42765.html), "decided that the electricity industry should, from now on be allowed to build and operate new nuclear power stations, subject to meeting the normal planning and regulatory requirements."


The Labor government acclaimed nuclear technology as "a tried and tested technology" that "has provided the UK with secure supplies of safe, low-carbon electricity for half a century."


“...8. We set out the Government’s preliminary view on nuclear power in our Energy White Paper15. This explained how nuclear power related to our overall energy strategy. In particular, we highlighted the uncertainties we face in the availability and costs of the UK’s energy supplies over the coming decades. We also need to respond to the challenges of climate change. These uncertainties relate to: future fossil fuel and carbon prices; how quickly we can achieve energy efficiency savings and the therefore likely levels of energy demand; the speed, direction and future economics of development of the renewables sector; and the technical feasibility of and costs associated with applying carbon capture and storage technologies to electricity generation on a commercial scale.”


“9. It is our view that, given these uncertainties, our energy strategy should be based on diversity and flexibility in the energy mix and has accordingly developed policies which keep open the widest possible range of low-carbon generating options. These options would include renewables and the use of gas and coal with CCS, as well as nuclear. Unnecessarily ruling out one of these options would, in our view, increase the risk that we would be unable to meet our climate change and energy security objectives.”


The report concluded that rational and reasonable decisions are needed NOW because:


"...energy companies will need to build around 30-35 GW of new electricity generating capacity
over the next two decades. They will have to make around two-thirds of this investment by 2020. So investment decisions made in the next few years will affect our electricity generation infrastructure for decades to come."