Greenpeace Founder Favors Nuclear Energy

In recent years I have read many things written by Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace. While still defending a cleaner environment, he is quite critical of many contemporary environmentalists and the current "movement" as a whole. Thanks goes to my friend Stu for pointing out his latest, an opinion piece in the Washington Post titled Going Nuclear. Read both pages of this article... I think you'll be impressed. He makes a very good case for why the US should have more Nuclear plants.

Included are brief responses to the major criticisms of increasing electricity production from Nuclear plants. For example, in response to the charge that Nuclear plants are not safe, Moore writes:

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 containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up. The multi-agency 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 fighting 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 of a radiation-related accident in the history of the U.S. civilian nuclear reactor program.

And in response to the "most serious" issue raised against Nuclear power, that Nuclear fuel can be diverted to make nuclear weapons, Moore writes:

...just 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 tools -- the machete -- has 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 fire.

His responses on each point are all good ones. A good read, and further proof that "environmentalism" is far from a monolithic movement.