A Nuclear Solution to GLOBAL WARMING?

• Position: How nuclear energy affects greenhouse gas emissions - Brief Article

Nuclear power can play a significant role in preventing catastrophic global warming, maintain William C. Sailor and Bob van der Zwaan, visiting science fellows at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford (Calif.) University. They are affiliated with Nuclear Power Issues and Choices for the 21st Century, a CISAC project investigating whether nuclear energy has a legitimate role in preventing global warming.

"Mankind is facing a tremendous challenge with global climate change. In the coming two decades, we have to consider new energy sources, including nuclear," indicates Van der Zwaan, on leave from the Free University of the Netherlands, though he admits that widespread public concern has led several countries to halt development of nuclear energy. "Eighty-five percent of all Dutch people are opposed to it," he notes, and the numbers are similar in other European countries.

Most of the world's energy is derived from fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas. Only about six percent comes from nuclear power plants However, burning fossil fuels emits large amounts of carbon dioxide ([CO.sub.2]) and other gases that trap infrared radiation from the sun. As a result say many climatologists, the atmosphere is heating up like the inside of a greenhouse, and unless the rate of [CO.sub.2] gas emissions is reduced the temperature of the Earth will increase by as much as 6 [degrees] F in the 21st century. Such global warming, according to worst-case scenarios, will cause disastrous floods, droughts, and erratic changes in ocean currents, and even will spread tropical diseases and parasites throughout the planet.

Advocates say that nuclear power can help prevent global warming because reactors produce virtually no greenhouse gases. They point to France, where about 60 nuclear power plants provide three-fourths of the country's electricity.

Critics argue that nuclear power is inherently dangerous and prohibitively expensive. They point out that accidents like the 1986 Chernobyl power plant disaster in the former Soviet Union can result in radiation poisoning that lasts many generations. Opponents also maintain that safely storing radioactive waste is difficult and that newly designed breeder reactors could make it easier for plutonium fuel to get into the hands of terrorists and others eager to build small-scale nuclear weapons.

Van der Zwaan and Sailor point to recent studies showing that, to prevent dangerous climate change...