Professor James Lovelock recently visited Adelaide as a speaker for the Adelaide Festival of Ideas, among other things, he spruiked nuclear power as a solution to climate change.
Professor James Lovelock is the originator of 'The Gaia Hypothesis', proposing that all parts of the earth’s biosphere are interdependent on each other and that the planet could be represented as a self-regulating organism. While Professor Lovelock’s work has profoundly shaped our perceptions of the world, when it comes to the nuclear chain, he has got it very wrong.
In the face of catastrophic climate change, Professor Lovelock has argued that nuclear power is an unpleasant but necessary medicine: "I see in the end that we must get our energy from renewable resources but I don't see it happening in under 50 years. I don't see nuclear as the ultimate solution, I see it as a kind of medicine, which is an unpleasant medicine in some ways that we have to take while we're curing ourselves by fossil fuels." (ABC Science Show, 2001.)
Chernobyl
“You get things like Chernobyl but what happens? Thirty-odd brave firemen died who needn't have died but its general effect on the world population is almost negligible." (Quoted in Radford, 2000.)
To describe the global impact of Chernobyl as "almost negligible" is absurd given the myriad of well-documented impacts, not least the permanent relocation of about 220,000 people. Furthermore, applying a standard risk estimate to the collective dose gives an estimated human death toll of 24,000.
"The land around the failed Chernobyl power station was evacuated because it was unsafe for people, but it is now rich in wildlife. We call it nuclear waste and worry about its safe disposal. I wonder if instead we should use it as an incorruptible guardian of the beautiful places on Earth. Who would dare cut down a forest which was a storage place of nuclear ash?" (Quoted in Walsh, 2005.)
While Lovelock describes the area around Chernobyl as “rich in wildlife”, recent studies by biologists suggest otherwise. A University of South Carolina study on birds described a high proportion of those studied as suffering from “radiation-induced sickness and genetic damage”, as well as reduced reproductive rates and high mortality rates. A study from Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, also highlights that a third of barn swallow nestlings studied in the Chernobyl area had malformations.
Nuclear Waste
"I have told the BNFL ... that I would happily take the full output of one of their big power stations. I think the high-level waste is a stainless steel cube of about a metre in size." The waste would serve two purposes, Lovelock says: "One would be home heating. You would get free home heat from it. And the other would be to sterilise the stuff from the supermarket, the chicken and whatnot, full of salmonella. Just drop it down through a hole. I'm not saying this tongue-in-cheek. I am quite serious." (Quoted in Radford, 2000.)
Weapons Proliferation
Lovelock rarely comments on nuclear weapons proliferation, yet when he does his remarks are inaccurate. On ABC’s Lateline in 2006, he commented that "Modern nuclear power stations are useless for making bombs". Yet former US Vice-President Al Gore recently remarked, “For eight years in the White House, every weapons proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program, and if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal ... then we'd have to put them in so many places we'd run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale."
- A typical power reactor produces enough plutonium each year for about 30 nuclear weapons. There is no serious dispute that this 'reactor grade' plutonium can be used for weapons.
- Most of the technologies used in support of nuclear power programs can also be used in support of a nuclear weapons program.
Links to the nuclear industry
According to Nuclear Spin (http://www.nuclearspin.org) Lovelock has long-standing ties to the nuclear industry and its supporters. He is Patron of the British organisation Supporters of Nuclear Energy (SONE), with links to nuclear power organisations British Energy and British Nuclear Fuels Limited. In addition to promoting nuclear energy in the UK, SONE has also actively opposed the development of renewable energy.
Nuclear power and climate change
Because electricity generation only contributes to around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, replacing coal-fired electricity generating plants with nuclear energy would only make a small dent in carbon emissions. Even if nuclear power could be doubled by 2050, greenhouse emissions would only be reduced by 5%. This is less than one-tenth of the reduction required to stabilise atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Nuclear power is no solution to climate change:
TOO SLOW: climate change demands an urgent response, yet it would take an estimated 15 years before a nuclear reactor could power a single light bulb in Australia. Renewable energy could be delivering energy within a year and energy efficiency technologies can cut pollution tomorrow.
TOO DANGEROUS: nuclear power carries the risk of a serious accident like Chernobyl and, in an increasingly unstable would, the uranium and nuclear power industries both increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation and are themselves a real terrorist threat.
TOO DIRTY: uranium mining and nuclear power create highly toxic waste that remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. For example, BHP Billiton’s Roxby Downs uranium mine in SA already has a radioactive waste stockpile of over 70 million tonnes, and at the Beverley mine in the state’s north-east, radioactive waste is simply dumped into groundwater. Uranium goes on to become high-level nuclear waste at reactors around the world, and there is still not a single repository on earth for the long-term disposal of this waste. Nuclear waste means permanent pollution.
TOO EXPENSIVE: even after more than 50 years of massive government subsidies around the world, nuclear power still can’t pay for itself. Its requires billions of dollars to build and run a plant and more to manage the radioactive waste produced and to decommission the reactor itself when it reaches the end of its life.
MORE INFORMATION
Nuclear Power: no solution to climate change
http://www.foe.org.au/campaigns/anti-nuclear/issues
James Lovelock and Patrick Moore
http://www.foe.org.au/campaigns/anti-nuclear/issues
Reasons not to glow, Orion Magazine
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/316
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