by Delores Broten
George Bush is doing it. So is China, and the province of Ontario. Not too surprising, but some of the other proponents of new nuclear power plants are startling. If it will allow industrial extraction to continue unabated, we might expect Patrick Moore to be in favour of nuclear as part of a “sustainable future.”
But James Lovelock, the philosopher who popularized the Gaia theory of the earth, says that we have no choice but to turn to nuclear power in order to avert the disaster of climate change. So does Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue.
Living on Earth, an environmental web show in the US, spotlighting nuclear fusion, discusses the “once and future source of power, the atom,” although it also points out that scientists have been trying to develop the supposedly cleaner (and very expensive) nuclear fusion option for 40 years.
Why are all these enviros so hot for nukes? At issue is climate change and the seriousness of the situation facing the earth. Bill McKibben said it eloquently as he took Robert Kennedy Jr. to task for opposing a large wind farm off Cape Cod: “…Even if we win every other battle, if we lose this one, it won’t make any difference at all. You can ‘keep’ every river and bay and lake and mountain and wilderness, but if the temperature goes up 5 degrees globally, it won’t matter. The fi sh that live there won’t be able to survive, the trees that anchor the landscape will die, the coral reefs will bleach and crumble.…Whatever the particular part of the world that we’re each working on, it’s still a part of the world. Global warming is the whole thing.” (Grist, January 2006, http://www.grist.org/)
But can you “fi x” one source of irrevocable and lasting harm to all living creatures (The Great Warming) by creating a different kind of permanent harm (The Great Poisoning)? The problems are pretty well unanswerable: nuclear waste and nuclear accidents, the ever-increasing assessment of the danger of even low level radiation, vulnerability to terrorism of all kinds, the ecological and social disruption of uranium mining and its cancerous byproducts, including depleted uranium, and the amazing fi scal irresponsibility of the industry.
Further environmental organizations around the world are pointing out that nuclear power is no solution to climate change, due to the energy intensive use of fossil fuels to mine the uranium, manufacture the fuel rods, ship and tend the waste for the foreseeable future. Worse yet, in Saskatchewan and Alberta, the proposal is to build nuclear power plants to power the extraction of oil from the Tar Sands.
Nuclear plants are also an unreliable and expensive form of power, awkward, if not dangerous, to start up and shut down, unwieldy at the best of times, and relying on a massive transfer of cost to future generations through radioactive waste, and also through fi nancial defi cits.
In Canada, Energy Probe says that subsidies to the nuclear industry are responsible for 12% of the national debt. In the US, although the industry still has “hands in your pockets,” it is somewhat constrained by the tough deterrents of capitalism and the insurance industry.
Meanwhile, in both Canada and the US, the waste keeps piling up, held in temporary holding ponds beside the reactors, waiting to be trucked across the continent and put into some as-yet-undetermined permanent resting ground.
It is worth repeating over and over again: “Conservation and alternative energy sources can and must replace nuclear power. Conservation and alternative energy sources are cheaper, cleaner and more reliable.” As the nuclear debate re-ignites, that is sure to be one of the mantras.
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See http://www.nukewaste.ca/