Lovolution around the sun.

• Author: Neutopia, Doctress
• Position: Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030 - Book review

Earth Day 2006

Dr. Andrew Weil was the keynote speaker at Tucson, Arizona's 2006 Earth Day festival. At the end of his speech, he shocked the audience when he said that his generation made a big mistake when they rejected the use of nuclear power. He said he got great personal satisfaction from growing crops on his land that he then uses to fuel his biodiesel car. But, he said, traveling around the world he has seen the world's energy needs and he felt that biofuel wasn't the answer for our long-term energy needs. Nuclear power could provide safe, clean energy we need without destroying the biosphere.

Apparently, he is not a lone environmentalist who supports "atoms for peace." One of the Green-peace founders, Patrick Moore, wrote an article in the Washington Post about how he was wrong about the dangers of nuclear power and now he has come to realize the necessity of using it in combination with other alternative energies.

As far as the question of the dangers of nuclear wastes, Moore felt that used fuel could be recycled, greatly reducing the amount of waste that would need to be treated and disposed of in a facility such as Yucca Mountain. The Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS) counter this argument by saying that building new reactors would mean building Yucca Mountain style dump sites every four years, an impractical task. More wastes means more radioactive material being transported on our highways and railroads which means more chance for "error or terror."

As far as terrorism, he said that all technology since the invention of fire could be used for good or evil. But, for him, it is better to live with the dangers of nuclear power than live on a planet whose atmosphere has been destroyed by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal. He cites the Clean Air Council's report that coal is "responsible for 64% of sulfur dioxide emissions, 26% of nitrous oxides and 33% of mercury emissions."

But the anti-nuclear folks say that we would need 300 new nuke plants in the United States to make any impact to halt the climate change gases. Since they cost around $4 billion or more to build and seven or more years to complete, they will not offset the climate changing factors quickly enough to make a difference. Moore implies that coal is the major factor in releasing global warming gases whereas NIRS says it is fossil-fueled vehicles--not electricity--which is the major cause of the problem.

In a radio interview, Moore mentioned that other noted environmentalists like James Lovelock also support the use of nuclear power. At a dinner during a conference on the Gaia Hypothesis at Oxford University, Lovelock revealed how he thought we should build nuclear power plants in deserted places like the Brazilian tropical rainforest. His statement didn't surprise me because his hypothesis lacked a spiritual dimension.

For him, Gaia is a science, not a religion. But irrespective of spiritual context, what biologist in his right mind could think a place that is home to more than half of the world's estimated 10 million species of plants, animals and insects is deserted? And then, if there was a nuclear power accident, it wouldn't matter if a deadly cloud of radioactive gases was released? Didn't Lovelock know that "one-fifth of the world's fresh water is in the Amazon Basin?" What would happen if that water was contaminated?

After Dr. Weil spoke there was no opportunity to debate his reasoning. He rushed off in his biodiesel car before anyone had a chance to catch up with him. When I later approached the editor of the Nuclear Resister, Felice Cohen-Joppa, about what she thought about his pro-nuke statement, her comment was, "How sad that he shows such a lack of imagination."

Some people seem oblivious to the consequents of such environmental destruction, saying, "So what? We can always desalinate the sea by using nuclear power plants to energize the pumps." And so urban sprawl continues growing out of control, sucking the rivers dry and using what seems to be limitless nuclear power for its mammoth energy needs. This vision of the world as it is, and continuing to grow in an unsustainable pattern of development, is destroying the world. To change our current energy and water use requires radical vision and action.

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