Nukes??? Nukes!!!
Professor James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis is now saying that Nuclear Power is the way to go... Took you long enough!
From an article in the U.K. Independent:
bq. Global warming is now advancing so swiftly that only a massive expansion of nuclear power as the world's main energy source can prevent it overwhelming civilisation, the scientist and celebrated Green guru, James Lovelock, says.
bq. His call will cause huge disquiet for the environmental movement. It has long considered the 84-year-old radical thinker among its greatest heroes, and sees climate change as the most important issue facing the world, but it has always regarded opposition to nuclear power as an article of faith. Last night the leaders of both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth rejected his call.
bq. Professor Lovelock, who achieved international fame as the author of the Gaia hypothesis, the theory that the Earth keeps itself fit for life by the actions of living things themselves, was among the first researchers to sound the alarm about the threat from the greenhouse effect.
Good move although our contributions to the present warming cycle are much overstated. We are emerging from a recent cold cycle which followed the medieval warm cycle (remember all of the vineyards in Greenland).
The only issue I have with Nuclear Power is that we need to do what the US Navy, the French and Japanese do -- they only build a few different kinds of plants and if something starts going wrong with a pump, they will go through and upgrade all of the pumps in that kind of plant. As it is now, all of the US commercial power plants are unique -- each one is different so there is no form of communal learning and improvement possible.
Posted by DaveH at May 24, 2004 10:26 AM