It’s a weird but pleasing experience to find myself in agreement with someone whose views I generally detest. It’s even weirder and more pleasant to find an environmentalist actually saying something sensible for once. It’s triply weird when it’s a Guardian columnist.
George Monbiot didn’t earn the nickname “Moonbat” for nothing. But Mooners is seriously endangering his cred at the Grauniad with his latest column.
You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.
As Monbiot says, Fukushima was a case study in doing everything wrong under the worst possible circumstances. Yet, “as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation”. He then disappears even further down the rabbit-hole of logic and evidence by admitting that “greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution”.
In an even more dizzying twist, Monbiot even concedes that “renewables” bring plenty of environmental problems of their own.
Like most greens, I favour a major expansion of renewables. I can also sympathise with the complaints of their opponents[…]
The impacts and costs of renewables rise with the proportion of power they supply, as the need for storage and redundancy increases. It may well be the case (I have yet to see a comparative study) that up to a certain grid penetration – 50% or 70%, perhaps? – renewables have smaller carbon impacts than nuclear, while beyond that point, nuclear has smaller impacts than renewables[…]
The more work we expect renewables to do, the greater the impact on the landscape will be, and the tougher the task of public persuasion.
That surely makes nuclear the best option, right? According to the green fundamentalists, hell, no.
But expanding the grid to connect people and industry to rich, distant sources of ambient energy is also rejected by most of the greens […]What they want, they tell me, is something quite different: we should power down and produce our energy locally. Some have even called for the abandonment of the grid. Their bucolic vision sounds lovely, until you read the small print.
Shock twist: a climate alarmist looks at the facts and realises that renewables simply won’t cut it. M. Night Shyamalan twist: renewables cause massive environmental damage.
Look at what happened in Britain before the industrial revolution.
The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain – wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad, as well as most sea trout and salmon.Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-century equivalent of today’s biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel[…]
Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.
Monbiot is absolutely right that too many in the nuclear industry (like TEPCO, for instance) are liars and shonks. But ours is not a perfect world. There is a least-worst solution at hand now: nuclear.
Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.
The Guardian
Like Monbiot, I too once railed against nuclear. I went to my little marches and wore my little yellow badges. Then I looked at the facts – and changed my mind.
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