One of the people helping to drive that debate is Ben Heard of Decarbonise South Australia and Think Climate Consulting. A one-time skeptic, he's now embracing nuclear energy as the only rational way to battle climate change while producing the electricity we need to power advanced societies.
Recently, Heard took part in a television debate sponsored by the Australian Broadcasting Company. As we've written before here at NEI, we're not climate scientists and don't take a position on the validity of research that has concluded that climate change is caused by human activity. However, it's only logical to conclude that you want to reduce the amount of carbon emitted to the atmosphere while still generating enough electricity to power a modern society, nuclear energy has to be part of your energy portfolio.
With that, I'd like to share Heard's opening statement from the ABC debate:
Powerful stuff. Hat tip to Rod Adams for picking up the clip.
Comments
The nice thing with man-made power sources, like nuclear, we have a much better understanding of their impacts to the environment. Which may make them look worse than other power sources with less developed understanding (like wind and solar), but at least we have a decent handle on what can happen and how to clean it up.
Solar and wind do not melt down. They just quit. Having no electricity kills people.
Twenty thousand people were killed by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, but we are still can't find the deaths from the Fukushima disaster.
BTW, mining the neodymium used in the magnets for wind turbine generators brings up quite a bit of radioactive thorium out of the earth at the same time.
Wind energy need 100-200 kg Neodymium per MW
Do you REALLY want to tear down every hillside and blight seashores and farmland and countryside with these monstrous metal stalks just to achieve that small fraction of energy needed to power a nation? Examine why you loathe nuclear so much first before you sacrifice our precious scenic natural heritage.
James Greenidge
Queens NY
Wind and solar continues to be just an alibi for coal and natural gas. Because of the intermittency of these power sources, they cannot dominate our grids, and this is evident by the slowing build-out in countries that reach some 15% wind. Nuclear, however, has been demonstrated by France to be a real solution, covering 80% of generation.
Always unasked is Based whose criteria? On radiation adverse Japanese officials so skittish that they'd confiscate a radium dial watch, or on cities so soaked with background radiation that the area outside Fukushima's gates would be a day in the arctic? It's no the "Forbidden Zone" of the Planet of The Apes! There's no reason they couldn't have reopened that area for habitation months ago. Have land values in that region sunk any? Heck, if they threw up their hands and told the world that Fukushima's a lost cause evacuated area and now available for free homesteading if you sign our wavier, there're not enough ships to truck the fresh population in!
James Greenidge
Queens NY
Even though some people in very-high background radiation areas might receive a higher dose from background radiation, I wouldn't move in there with my kids just yet. Japan is large enough that people don't have to live in that small plume. However, I'd be happy to be convinced otherwise, if you have the info.
We can hang on to an outdated double-standard that hurts our best interest...or perhaps acknowledge the financial conflicts of interest the nuclear industry has with fossils and actively find ways to work around them...or we can just keep waltzing around the subject as our nuclear fleet gets pounded by climate change related weather that NEI keeps disingenuously calling "unprecedented." It's the new normal and we all know it.
Perhaps as an industry we should show the same respect to other scientific fields that we seek from the public and policy makers? Maybe even work together with the climate community to actually solve the problems at hand?! A revolutionary thought, I know...