Sean Edwards reports that the environmental, scientific, economic, philosophical and moral arguments stack up, suggesting it is time for South Australia to embrace nuclear power. Nowadays anti-nuclear activists are among the greatest obstacles to the environmental healing of planet Earth.
Try as the greenies - aka adversaries - might, they can not meaningfully oppose nuclear power on environmental grounds. That is because nuclear reactors produce no emissions that contribute to global warming, acid rain or smog. In fact, the life-cycle emissions of nuclear energy rank alongside those of renewables but unlike renewables, nuclear energy can actually provide base-load power, which means that nuclear runs day and night, wind or rain, and can be scaled up - greater than 500 MW, or down - less than 500 MW - aka Small Modular Reactors, depending on the needs.
When prominent climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen, says nuclear power is responsible for saving 1.8 million lives from reduced air pollution and that it may save 7 million more in the next four decades, the ethical argument against the nuclear industry really has been lost. When he and three of his leading colleagues implore anti-nuclear environmental organisations to revise their position, it is clear that environmental science has diverged sharply from anti-nuclear activism. So the anti-nuclear campaigners argument moves swiftly onto safety. But assessed against the historical record, nuclear energy is as safe as wind power and far safer than coal.
But what about Fukushima, they plead, where, to this day, radiation release has not resulted in a single death or radiation sickness. That means even a nuclear plant struck by a tsunami and an earthquake, compounded by human error, failed to kill a single person. In other words, even when everything is going wrong, nuclear struggles to do physical harm, while coal kills thousands when everything is going right underground and on the surface. Time to dump the fear.
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