Great story yesterday on NPR’s Weekend Edition about Stewart Brand and his new take on nuclear power. For the life of me I’ve never been able to figure out why environmentalists weren’t down with the idea of nuclear power. Seems completely obvious to me. Brand, I’m sure, is going to piss a million people off, but he’s right. 100% right.
Says Brand:
I surprised myself. I used to be, you know, pretty much a knee-jerk environmentalist on this particular subject. And then because of climate change I reinvestigated the matter and discovered that I’d been misled in many of the details on how nuclear works. And I finally got to the point where I’m so pro-nuclear now that I would be in favor of it even if climate change and greenhouse gases were not an issue.
I’ve been researching this stuff for a book I did called Whole Earth Discipline
. And the research led me into looking at what are the real threats of radiation – way less than we thought; what really happened at Chernobyl – way less than we thought; what are the efficiencies of nuclear – way better than I thought; what is the tradeoff against solar and wind, and one of things environmentalists are just learning now is that because solar and wind are so dilute, they make an enormous footprint on the land in order to collect them and then another large footprint with the long transmission lines. Hundred of square miles get turned over to turbines or even more deleteriously to solar farms. And then the other major thing I learned about is that there are now small nuclear reactors being designed that could be distributed in a micro-power format that looks very attractive to an environmentalist.
Sensible. True.