<div><a href="http://www.thepeakist.com/james-lovelocks-argument-for-nuclear-energy/">http://www.thepeakist.com/james-lovelocks-argument-for-nuclear-energy/</a></div>
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<div><a title="Permanent Link: James Lovelock’s Argument for Nuclear Energy" href="http://www.thepeakist.com/james-lovelocks-argument-for-nuclear-energy/" rel="bookmark">James Lovelock’s Argument for Nuclear Energy</a></div>
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<p>Diderot has summarised Lovelock’s argument for nuclear energy for us. Perhaps the most contentious issue facing us today, whilst nuclear energy has always been the bete noire of environmentalists, Lovelock has endorsed nuclear energy as the only practical solution to the twin crisis of global warming and energy supply. Diderot writes:</p>
<p>Lovelock devotes chapter 5 of his new book, “The Revenge of Gaia”, to a<br>discussion of our major energy options. The background to the<br>discussion is Lovelock’s belief that the planet is poised to flip into a<br>
new hotter stable state with average temperatures 8 degrees higher than<br>now. It’s an equilibrium that Gaia has reached many times before, most<br>recently 55 million years ago when carbon dioxide was at a concentration<br>
similar to the one we are currently creating. No one knows when we’ll<br>flip but all known climate systems are now in positive feedback and we<br>can expect to move to ‘hot earth’ within the next century. When we do<br>
most parts of the planet will become uninhabitable, the sea will swallow<br>London.</p>
<p>With that in mind, Lovelock considers the energy options:<a id="more-44"></a></p>
<p>Fossil Fuel. Lovelock is confident in chemists’ ability to synthesise<br>hydrogen or liquid fuels from relatively plentiful coal reserves (he’s a<br>chemist as well as a planetry physician) but believes that for<br>civilisation to survive, all the carbon dioxide must be sequestered.<br>
The world produces 27,000 million tons of CO2 annually; frozen solid at<br>-80 degrees it would make a mountain 1 mile high and 12 miles in<br>circumference. We can’t do it.</p>
<p>Natural Gas. Around 2 to 4 percent of gas we extract leaks away, and it<br>has 24 times the warming effect of CO2.</p>
<p>Hydrogen. Hydrogen is a battery - you need energy to make it.</p>
<p>Wind. Wind is intermittent and we can’t currently store its energy. It<br>would require 276,000 100 metre high 1 megawatt turbines, 3 per square<br>mile, to meet the UK’s current energy requirements. Wind farms are<br>
another pernicious agri-business further blighting our already decimated<br>countryside. Offshore windfarms are too expensive - according to the<br>Royal Society of Engineers Report 2004 they’re over 3 times more<br>expensive than nuclear.</p>
<p>Wave and Tidal. There are several schemes running around the UK coast<br>but they currently deliver only a tiny percentage of our energy use.<br>Lovelock believes it will be another 20 to 40 years before they can be<br>
scaled up sufficiently.</p>
<p>Hydro. Great if you’ve got a river but there aren’t enough of them.</p>
<p>Bio Fuels. “We have to discard the old-fashioned teaching of both<br>science and religion and begin to look on the forrested land surface of<br>the Earth as something that evolved to serve the metabolism of Earth; it<br>
is irreplacable. We have already taken more than half of the productive<br>land to grow food for ourselves. How can we expect Gaia to manage the<br>Earth if we try to take the rest of the land for fuel production?”</p>
<p>Solar. Too expensive. “At the Centre for Alternative Technology in<br>Wales there is an experimental house with a roof made almost entirely of<br>silicon photocells. In summer it provides about 3 kilowatts of<br>electricity, but the cost of the installation was comparable with that<br>
of the house itself, and the expected life of the cells is about ten<br>years.”</p>
<p>Nuclear Fusion. Holy Grail; 20 years out at least.</p>
<p>Nuclear Fission. The problem of nuclear waste is “a nightmare fantasy<br>wholly without substance in the real world”. Radiation is in any case<br>only dangerous to us, not to Gaia. Compare the 27,000 million tons of<br>
carbon dioxide waste we currently produce (a mile high frozen mountain)<br>with nuclear that produces 2 million times less waste - it would occupy<br>a 16 metre cube. The carbon dioxide waste is invisible but so deadly<br>
that if unchecked it will kill nearly everyone. Lovelock has offered to<br>store the annual high level radioactive waste from a nuclear power<br>station on his small plot of land where he will use it to warm his hands<br>
and make tea. Safety fears are overblown, concerning Chernobyl the WHO<br>reported 45 deaths after 14 years and 75 after 19 years, and what do you<br>expect if you disable the safety systems and then turn up the power?<br>
The twin fears of nuclear war and cancer are out of all proportion to<br>their actual risk; we are pampered westerners and don’t know we’re born.</p>
<p>“Meanwhile at the world’s climate centres the barometer continues to<br>fall and tell of the imminent danger of a climate storm whose severity<br>the Earth has not endured for 55 million years. But in the cities the<br>
party goes on; how much longer before reality enters our minds?”</p>
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<p>Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett</p></div>