Educate yourself - see things differently.

Gwyneth Cravens did ......... and her views completely turned around.

Is Nuclear Energy Our Best Hope?
Despite its negative image, nuclear energy may be the most efficient and realistic means of meeting the rapidly-growing demand for power in the United States.

by Gwyneth Cravens

Four years ago this month, James Lovelock upset a lot of his fans. Lovelock was revered in the green movement for developing the Gaia hypothesis, which links everything on earth to a dynamic, organic whole. Writing in the British newspaper The Independent, Lovelock stated in an op-ed: “We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear—the one safe, available energy source—now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet.”

Lovelock explained that his decision to endorse nuclear power was motivated by his fear of the consequences of global warming and by reports of increasing fossil-fuel emissions that drive the warming. Jesse Ausubel, head of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, recently echoed Lovelock’s sentiment. “As a green, I care intensely about land-sparing, about leaving land for nature,” he wrote. “To reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy such as wind, water, and biomass cause serious environmental harm. Measuring renewables in watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors.” All of this has led several other prominent environmentalists to publicly favor new nuclear plants. I had a similar change of heart. For years I opposed nuclear power, but while I was researching my book Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy, my views completely turned around.

According to the Department of Energy, just to maintain nuclear’s 20 percent share of the energy supply, the United States would need to add three or four new nuclear power plants a year starting in 2015. (There are 104 nuclear power plants currently in operation in the United States.) But no new nuclear power plants have been built here in 30 years, partly because of the public’s aversion to nuclear power after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Now NRG Energy, based in Princeton, New Jersey, is sticking its neck out with plans to build two new nuclear reactors at the South Texas Project facility near Bay City. The new reactors will be able to steadily generate a total of 2,700 megawatts—enough to light up 2 million households.

The United States alone pumped the equivalent of nearly 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2005. More than 2 billion tons of that came from electricity generation—not surprising, considering that we burn fossil fuels for 70 percent of our electricity. About half of all our electricity comes from more than 500 coal-fired plants. Besides contributing to global warming, their pollution has a serious health impact. Burning coal releases fine particulates that kill 24,000 Americans annually and cause hundreds of thousands of cases of lung and heart problems.

America’s electricity demand is expected to increase by almost 50 percent by 2030, according to the Department of Energy. Unfortunately, renewable energy sources, such as the wind and sun, are highly unlikely to meet that need. Wind and solar installations today supply less than 1 percent of electricity in the United States, do so intermittently, and are decades away from providing more than a small boost to the electric grid. “To meet the 2005 U.S. electricity demand of about 4 million megawatt-hours with around-the-clock wind would have required wind farms covering over 780,000 square kilometers,” Ausubel notes. For context, 780,000 square kilometers (301,000 square miles) is greater than the area of Texas. Solar power fares badly too, in Ausubel’s analysis: “The ……………

Click here http://discovermagazine.com/2008/may/02-is-nuclear-energy-our-best-hope for the rest of the story.

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