An Open Letter to Environmentalists on Nuclear Energy
Found on Conservation Bytes on Tuesday, 16 December 2014
Brook and Bradshaw argue that the full gamut of electricity-generation sources—including nuclear power—must be deployed to replace the burning of fossil fuels, if we are to have any chance of mitigating severe climate change.
Although renewable energy sources like wind and solar will likely make increasing contributions to future energy production, these technology options face real-world problems of scalability, cost, material and land use, meaning that it is too risky to rely on them as the only alternatives to fossil fuels. Nuclear power—being by far the most compact and energy-dense of sources—could also make a major, and perhaps leading, contribution.
The problem is that when an accident happens in a nuclear facility, you can instantly see the results; but the results from fossil fuels happen years, if not decades, later and can be so easily ignored. In the long run, those results can be worse on a global scale than a nuclear accident. Besides, it's not like renewable energy has no problems of its own.