Lovelock says Nukes are A,OK because they actually do very little harm to the biosphere, and most forms of life are little effected by radiation (see pictures of Chernobyl (Pripyat town), it looks a lot greener now that the people have left.
In fact build your nukes in the rain forest, It's probably the best way to protect it!
However...
I'm not convinced by Lovelock because he spends so little time "proving" his case that nuclear waste is as benign as he suggests. I look across the Channel and see the French generating 75% of their electricity from nuclear and accept that it is technically feasible and probably not the very high risk that the NGO's insist it is. However, it fails for me as it is not a sustainable solution. Here's why:
a) It suffers the low thermal efficiency of all our centralised power stations in that 60% of the fuel energy is wasted to water or the air. Crazy. It does not lend itself to CHP and so the proponents of nuclear now talk vaguely about possibly using the waste heat to generate hydrogen for what?
b) Given a) I firmly believe the answer is distributed generation (not more centralised generation) using CHP - some gas, some biomass, anaerobic digestion, etc. Also, much more renewable energy. We must adopt the kinds of renewable energy fiscal incentives long since used in Germany, Denmark, etc and now adopted by China.
c) Our standards of energy conservation are still very low in this country compared to Scandanavia even with revised Part L. Our highest SAP rating is below the minimum required in Sweden. We must do something about the demand side as resources are limited, including uranium. High levels of waste with a soaring global population competing for limited resources is not acceptable. When Angela Merkel came to power last year almost the first thing she did was allocate funding to upgrade pre-1978 (?) houses in Germany to the best energy standards over 20 years (5% per annum). UK politicians are consistently failing us.
d) Therefore a combination of b) and c) can provide a perfectly viable alternative strategy to new nuclear. Which is what we thought we were getting from the 2003 White Paper.
e) Nuclear has always been more expensive than claimed and when cradle to grave costs are included is still very expensive in my view. What other industry can hive off ?70 bn costs for waste management onto the taxpayer. It is insulting the way Blair and the other UK politicians dictate to us. We must strive for One Planet living, which is the only viable way for the generations to come.
What do you think?
