Patrick Moore Interviewed on CNN

In case you were watching The Wheel and missed it, Patrick Moore, co-Chair of the CASEnergy Coalition and co-founder of Greenpeace, appeared on CNN's Glenn Beck Program last night. The pull quote,

Hopefully, by 10 years from now, the first new nuclear plants will be coming online and, hopefully, by then we will have built more wind power so that we can turn the gas off when the wind is blowing.

But wind can only provide a small percentage. Denmark gets 15 percent of its energy from wind, and the people there realize now that they went a little overboard on wind, because it stops for three or four days at a time. The sun doesn`t shine at night or when it`s cloudy. These technologies have no storage capacity to be able to tide it over, so you have to back it up with something.

We should be building the backups, in other words, the continuous reliable power sources, such as nuclear and hydroelectric and biomass and geothermal and plug-in cars. But it doesn`t make sense to charge a plug-in hybrid on a coal-fired power plant. Therefore, we should be moving our electricity from 50 percent coal, 20 percent nuclear to 50 percent nuclear, 20 percent coal. We could do that in a 25- to 30-year period if we went at it like a moon shot.

The full transcript can be read here. James Meigs, Editor-in-Chief of Popular Mechanics, also appeared in the segment with Moore. Not discussed, unfortunately, was this remarkable article from the August issue on portable nuclear reactors.

Comments

Anonymous said…

I have viewed Greenpeace with disdain for some time, but this quote will force me to reevaluate. Time to do some web crawling...

July 24, 2008 at 9:12 AM

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