Nuclear Power is Dead. Long Live Nuclear Power

Making the green crowd happy:

James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis and one of the first important scientists to warn of the Greenhouse effect, has called for a massive expansion of nuclear power everywhere in the world, saying the alternative is climate catastrophe.

Professor Lovelock, now 84, wrote in the Independent this week that: "Global warming, like a fire, is accelerating and almost no time is left to act."

That means there is no time for the implementation of alternative energy sources such as the "wind, tide and water" technologies favoured by environmentalists.

In fact, Professor Lovelock says, "even if we stop all fossil fuel burning immediately, the consequences of what we have already done will last for 1,000 years. Every year that we continue burning carbon makes it worse for our descendants and for civilisation."

The solution?

Nuclear energy, on a global scale, immediately.

"Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media. These fears are unjustified, and nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen. If we fail to concentrate our minds on the real danger, which is global warming, we may die even sooner, as did more than 20,000 unfortunates from overheating in Europe last summer.

"I find it sad and ironic that the UK, which leads the world in the quality of its Earth and climate scientists, rejects their warnings and advice, and prefers to listen to the Greens. But I am a Green and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy.