Going Nuclear
TUCKER, WILLIAM
Going Nuclear One cure for global climate change may surprise you. by William Tucker James Lovelock is a strange duck. A British biologist who has made some extraordinary discoveries, such as the...
...As the nuclear option becomes more of a reality in this country, a fierce debate over its acceptability has already emerged in the environmental community...
...All this would just be standard Al Gore agitprop, except for one thing...
...We have already taken more than half of the productive land to grow food and raw material for ourselves...
...to make, if solidified, a mountain nearly one mile high and with a base twelve miles in circumference...
...worse still, the power stations have to be kept idling when wind energy is available...
...As soon as Blair announced his support for nuclear, the British Conservative party stupidly announced it would have to be against it...
...Compare this quantity with our yearly food consumption of about half a gigaton...
...But there's an intriguing core to Lovelock's mythology that bears consideration...
...I have offered in public to accept all of the high-level waste produced in a year from a nuclear power station for deposit on my small plot of land...
...The most recent report from Germany put wind energy as available only 16 percent of the time...
...By contrast, here is his assessment of wind energy: To supply the UK's present electricity needs would require 276,000 wind generators, about three per square mile, if national parks, urban, suburban and industrial areas are excluded...
...In particular, global warming threatens to send temperatures off the charts and mankind to the brink of extinction...
...Richard Dawkins and the disciWilliam Tucker is the author of a forthcoming book on the revival of nuclear power...
...At 87, Lovelock has been around the block more than a few times and is not willing to entertain what he calls the "romantic idealism" of contemporary environ-mentalism...
...But nothing arouses his wrath—or is it the wrath of Gaia?—as does "bio-fuels," producing fuels from crops...
...Many an urban romantic may fool himself that solar and renewables are going to be able to do the job, but Lovelock is not taking the bait...
...It apparently played a part in Prime Minister Tony Blair's recent endorsement of nuclear power before the G-8 Summit...
...I believe nuclear power is the only source of energy that will satisfy our demands and yet not be a hazard to Gaia and interfere with its capacity to sustain a comfortable climate and atmospheric composition...
...To grow this much already uses more of the Earth's land surface than may be safe...
...All this has been argued in other forums, however...
...What Dawkins is arguing against, of course, is the old notion that plants and animals can be purely altruistic...
...During the remaining 75 percent, electricity has to be made in standby fossil fuel power stations...
...The message these days is simple: "Boy, is she mad...
...As more than a dozen utilities prepare to submit proposals for new reactors to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Lovelock's book could play a similar role here...
...Burning fossil fuels produces 27,000 millon tons of carbon dioxide yearly, enough...
...But Lovelock is hitting at environmentalism's soft underbelly...
...On the surface, the Gaia hypothesis seems little more than a return to paganism...
...It would be a waste not to use it...
...In The Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock is playing the Delphic oracle...
...He has access to Gaia while others don't, and is bringing back the word from the The Revenge of Gaia Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity byJames Lovelock Basic, 176 pp., $25 mountaintop...
...An individual that can cooperate with other individuals probably does better in the long run, be it a species or a civilization...
...We would need the land area of several earths just to grow the bio fuel...
...Lovelock is being branded as a curmudgeon whose arguments are self-serving...
...ples of the selfish gene have savaged Lovelock in debate over the last decade, but the idea does have some interesting possibilities...
...How can we expect Gaia to manage the Earth if we try to take the rest of the land for fuel production...
...As a scientific theory it offers only one intriguing proposition: The neo-Dar-winistic suggestion that species which improve the environment for other species have a stronger chance of survival...
...Those who survive may be living in caves...
...Al Gore beware...
...A British biologist who has made some extraordinary discoveries, such as the presence of chlorofluo-rocarbons in the Antarctic atmosphere, he is also the originator of the "Gaia hypothesis," the theory that the Earth is actually a living organism...
...Even if these natural products were used only for transport, to fuel our cars, trucks, trains, ships and aircraft, it would require us to burn every year about two to three giga-tons of carbon as bio fuel...
...Here, for example, is Lovelock on the supposedly intractable problem of nuclear waste: An outstanding advantage of nuclear over fossil fuel energy is how easy it is to deal with the waste it produces...
...it would occupy a space about a cubic metre in size and fit safely in a concrete pit, and I would use the heat from its decaying radioactive elements to heat my home...
...Building symbiotic relationships has survival value...
...In fact, he admits, his opposition to wind power went into high gear when a neighbor signed a contract to install one of those 40-story monstrosities on land just next to his farm in West Devon...
...The same quantity of energy produced from nuclear fission reactions would generate two million times less waste, and it would occupy a sixteen-metre cube...
...The Revenge of Gaia is foursquare for nuclear power and contemptuously dismissive of windmills, solar collectors, "renewables," and all the other "alternate-energy" strategies...
...T]he intermittency of wind means that, at best, energy is available from wind turbines only 25 percent of the time...
...Published last year in Great Britain, The Revenge of Gaia has already had a significant impact on the energy debate there...
...Gaia has had it up to here with humanity and its polluting ways...
Vol. 12 • January 2007 • No. 17
