PATRICK MOORE Going Nuclear Patrick Moore was born in I 94 7, received a PhD. in ecology from the university of British Columbia and served as an environmental activist with Greenpeace from 19711986. Since then, he has taken very diferent views from Greenpeace, suggesting that global warming may not be man made and that nuclear power is an important environmental solution. He is co-founder and chief scientist for the consulting jinn of Greenspirit Strata gies. He is also a paid lobbyist for the Nuclear Energy Institute. One question readers need to consider is whether his history and current ailiations should inuence how his article is evaluated. \"Going Nuclear\" appeared as an opinion piece in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post, April 16, 2006. L}: In the early 19705 when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's rst voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of US. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy mayjust be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change. Look at it this way: More than 600 coal-red electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent ofU.S. emissionsor nearly 10 percent of global emissionsofCOQ, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can re- duce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power: And these days it can do so safely. I say that guardedly, of course, just days after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that his country had enriched uranium. \"The nuclear technology is only for the purpose ofpeace and nothing else,\" he said. But there is widespread speculation that, even though the process is ostensibly dedicated to producing electricity, it is in fact a cover for building nuclear weapons. And although I don't want to underestimate the very real dangers of nu- clear technology in the hands of rogue states, we cannot simply ban every tech- nology that is dangerous. That was the all-or-nothing mentality at the height of the Cold War, when anything nuclear seemed to spell doom for humanity and the environment. In 1979, Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon produced a frisson of fear with their starring roles in \"The China Syndrome,\" a ctional evocation of nuclear disaster in which a reactor meltdown threatens a city's survival. Less than two weeks after the blockbuster lm opened, a reactor core meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant sent shivers of very real anguish throughout the country. What nobody noticed at the time, though, was that Three Mile Island was in fact a success story: The concrete containment structure didjust what it was designed to doprevent radiation from escaping into the environment. And although the reactor itself was crippled, there was no injury or death among nuclear workers or nearby residents. Three Mile Island was the only seriOus acci- dent in the history ofnuclear energy generation in the United States, but it was 10 11 12 13 enough to scare us away from further developing the technology: There hasn't been a nuclear plant ordered up since then. Today, there are 103 nuclear reactors quietly deliveringjust 20 percent of America's electricity. Eighty percent of the people living within 10 miles of these plants approve of them (that's not including the nuclear workers). Although I don't live near a nuclear plant, I am now squarely in their camp. And I am not alone among seasoned environmental activists in changing my mind on this subject. British atmospheric scientistjames Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory, believes that nuclear energy is the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change. Stewart Brand, founder of the \"Whole Earth Catalog,\" says the environmental movement must embrace nuclear energy to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. On occasion, such opinions have been met with excommunication from the anti-nuclear priesthood: The late British Bishop Hugh Monteore, founder and director of Friends of the Earth, was forced to resign from the group's board after he wrote a pro-nuclear article in a church newsletter. There are signs of a new willingness to listen, though, even among the staunchest anti-nuclear campaigners. When I attended the Kyoto climate meet- ing in Montreal last December, I spoke to a packed house on the question of a sustainable energy future. I argued that the only way to reduce fossil fuel emis- sions from electrical production is through an aggressive program of renewable energy sources (hydroelectric, geothermal heat pumps, wind, etc.) plus nuclear. The Greenpeace spokesperson was rst at the mike for the question period, and I expected a tongue-lashing. Instead, he began by saying he agreed with much of what I saidnot the nuclear bit, of c0urse, but there was a clear feeling that all options must be explored. Here's why: Wind and solar pOwer have their place, but because they are in- termittent and unpredictable they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive al- ready, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants. Given that hydroelectric resources are built pretty much to capacity, nuclear is, by elimina- tion, the only viable substitute for coal. It's that simple. That's not to say that there aren't real problemsas well as various myths associated with nuclear energy. Each concern deserves careful consideration: Nuclear energy is expensive. It is in fact one of the least expensive energy sources. In 2004, the average cost of producing nuclear energy in the United States was less than two cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable with coal and hydro- electric. Advances in technology will bring the cost down further in the future. Nuclear plants are not safe. Although Three Mile Island was a success story, the accident at Chernobyl, 20 years ago this month, was not. But Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen. This early model of Soviet reactor had no con- tainment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up. The multiagency U.N. Chernobyl Forum reported last year that 56 deaths could be directly attributed to the accident, most of those from radiation or burns suffered while ghting the fire. Tragic as those deaths were, they pale in comparison to the more than 5,000 coal-mining deaths that occur worldwide every year. No one has died ofa radiation-related accident in the history of the U.S. civilian nuclear reactor program. (And although hundreds of uranium mine workers did die from radiation exposure underground in the early years of that industry, that problem was long ago corrected.) Nuclear waste will be daugemus for thousands afyears. Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed 14 16 1'7 18 19 from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the rst cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treat- ment and disposal. Last month,Japanjoined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind. Nuclear reactors are vulnerable to terrvrist attack. The six-feetthick reinforced concrete containment vessel protects the contents from the outside as well as the inside. And even if ajumbojet did crash into a reactor and breach the con- tainment, the reactor would not explode. There are many types of facilities that are far more vulnerable, including liquid natural gas plants, chemical plants and numerous political targets. Nuclear fuel can be diverted to make nuclear weapons. This is the most serious issue associated with nuclear energy and the most difcult to address, as the example of Iran shows. Butjust because nuclear technology can be put to evil purposes is not an argument to ban its use. Over the past 20 years, one of the simplest toolsthe machetehas been used to kill more than a million people in Africa, far more than were killed in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings combined. What are car bombs made of? Diesel oil, fertilizer and cars. If we banned everything that can be used to kill people, we would never have harnessed re. The only practical approach to the issue of nuclear weapons proliferation is to put it higher on the international agenda and to use diplomacy and, where necessary, force to prevent countries or terrorists from using nuclear materials for destructive ends. And new technologies such as the reprocessing system re- cently introduced in japan (in which the plutonium is never separated from the uranium) can make it much more di-icult for terrorists or rogue states to use civilian materials to manufacture weapons. The GOO-plus coal-red plants emit nearly 2 billion tons of (:02 annually the equivalent of the exhaust from about 300 million automobiles. In addition, the Clean Air Council reports that coal plants are responsible for 64 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, 26 percent of nitrous oxides and 33 percent of mer- cury emissions. These pollutants are eroding the health of our environment, producing acid rain, smog, respiratory illness and mercury contamination. Meanwhile, the 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States effectively avoid the release of 700 million tons of (102 emissions annuallythe equivalent of the exhaust from more than 100 million automobiles. Imagine if the ratio of coal to nuclear were reversed so that only 20 percent of our electricity was gener- ated from coal and 60 percent from nuclear. This would go a long way toward cleaning the air and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Every responsible envi- ronmen talist should support a move in that direction