CHAPTER 4 ENVIRONMENTALISTS DEBATE NUCLEAR POWER LUNCHEON PRESENTATION

• Jurisdiction: United States

Uranium Exploration and Development
(Apr 2006)
CHAPTER 4
ENVIRONMENTALISTS DEBATE NUCLEAR POWER LUNCHEON PRESENTATION
Len Ackland
Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Co-Director, Center for Environmental Journalism
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado

LEN ACKLAND

Len Ackland is an associate professor of journalism and founding director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he now serves as co-director.

Mr. Ackland is author of Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West (University of New Mexico Press, 2d Edition, May 2002). Prior to coming to the university in 1991, Mr. Ackland served for seven years as editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which under his direction won the National Magazine Award in 1987. He was a Chicago Tribune reporter from 1978-84 and a reporter at the Des Moines Register and other publications before that. While at the Register he won the George Polk Award in 1978 for local reporting. He began his journalism career in 1968 as a freelance writer in Vietnam.

Mr. Ackland holds a Master's degree in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Bachelor's degree in History from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

When well-known British environmentalist Hugh Montefiore declared his support for nuclear power a year and a half ago, he was forced to leave his two-decades-long service as a trustee of the Friends of the Earth environmental group.

"The dangers of global warming are greater than any other facing the plant," Montefiore, the former Anglican Bishop of Birmingham, wrote in the Catholic weekly The Tablet in October 2004. "The rise in ocean levels, melting ice fields and the death in Europe of 25,000 from last year's heat wave are pointers to what may lie ahead," he observed, adding that a recent study showed that unprecedented increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had caused an unexpected surge in the rate of global warming..

Montefiore continued, "As a theologian I believe that we have a duty to play our full part in safeguarding the future of our planet, and I have been a committed environmentalist for many years. It is because of this commitment and the graveness of the consequences of global warming for the planet that I have now come to the conclusion that the solution is to make more use of nuclear energy."

In his article, Montefiore approvingly described renewable energy, particularly wind, and also pointed out some serious problems with nuclear technology before concluding that nuclear power, which currently supplies 20 percent of the electricity in both the United Kingdom and the United States, is "the most viable alternative."¹

Montefiore was not the first prominent environmentalist to embrace nuclear power. That distinction went to James Lovelock, famous creator of the Gaia hypothesis that Earth is a self-regulating organism. He wrote in a May 2004 newspaper op-ed article that global warming is "the greatest danger that civilization has faced so far."

Lovelock went on, "What makes global warming so serious and so urgent is that the great Earth system, Gaia, is trapped in a vicious circle of positive feedback. Extra heat from any source, whether from greenhouse gases, the disappearance of Arctic ice or the Amazon forest, is amplified, and its effects are more than additive. It is almost as if we had lit a fire to keep warm, and failed to notice, as we piled on fuel, that the fire was out of control and the furniture had ignited. . . . Global warming, like a fire, is accelerating and almost no time is left to act."

[Page 4-2]

Thus, Lovelock, 84, wrote, "By all means let us use the small input from renewables sensibly, but only one immediately available source does not cause global warming and that is nuclear energy. . . . 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."²

Reaction to Lovelock's advocacy of nuclear power was as swift and predictable as was the reaction to Montefiore's. Nuclear power advocates were delighted, most environmentalists were appalled, and other observers were curious. But Lovelock had no affiliation with an environmental organization that could boot him out for heresy, as happened to Montefiore. Friends of the Earth director Tony Juniper explained Montefiore's forced resignation this way: "The organization is very happy to have internal debates about policies, but in practical terms, if you have two people from the organization saying different things, they're not going to have much impact," he told the BBC.³

Montefiore, who died last year at age 85, called in his article for public recognition of the seriousness of global warming as well as for a debate on nuclear energy. "The subject is so important that it should be a matter of informed public debate," he wrote.⁴

And since his 2004 article, awareness of global warming has certainly grown, with new groups joining atmospheric scientists and environmentalists in sounding the alarm. For example, last February some 86 U.S. evangelical Christian leaders backed an initiative to fight global warming. Their statement declared that "millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors."⁵ A month earlier, six former Environmental Protection Agency directors, including five who worked for Republican presidents, said the Bush administration should act more aggressively to restrict emissions of greenhouse gases.⁶

Scientific evidence has continued to mount about the dangerous pace of global warming. Just last month, reports by several teams of scientists concluded that the impact of human actions that pump carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and trap heat near Earth's surface was reaching a critical point. Rising temperatures are melting the planet's polar ice caps at a rapid rate, resulting in a rise in sea levels that could soon become irreversible, the studies concluded.

"If we don't like the idea of flooding out New Orleans, major portions of South Florida, and many other valued parts of the coastal U.S., we will have to commit soon to a major effort to stop most emissions of carbon to the atmosphere," University of Arizona scientist Jonathan T. Overpeck told the New York Times. He added, "People driving big old

[Page 4-3]

SUVs to...