Lovelock's Sticking Point: Nuclear Energy

James Lovelock has a lot of good and interesting things to say.  His environmental credentials are all in good order -- except for one aspect that must be a giant bone in the throat for some who otherwise would be disposed to agree with every point he makes, and that is that he likes nuclear power.   And maybe not just likes but even loves it.

He doesn't exactly say that there can't be too many nuclear power plants, nor does he quite say that radiation is good for us, but he's not too far from either idea.

He does say that there are too many coal-fired plants, along with too many wind farms, food farms, vehicles, people, and anything else that interferes with Gaia regulating the Earth's temp, which is getting harder and harder for it to do, thanks mainly to the actions of the too numerous people on the planet.

He believes that since electricity is absolutely indispensable to modern civilization, nuclear power is the most practical of all the ways used to produce it.  In addition, his pressing concern about the Earth turning into a greenhouse with no vents and set squarely in the midst of a burning desert, caused by carbon dioxide and methane collecting in the atmosphere, nuclear power is especially appealing to him because producing it doesn't add to the gaseous tarp covering the greenhouse, and so therein lies our best chance to save ourselves from the gathering catastrophe of the Earth overheating.

On hearing this two questions might immediately pop into minds.  The first is, what about where to put all the deadly nuclear waste, for which even nuclear power's most avid advocates have not yet come up with good answers, and the second is, what about accidents and the chances of meltdowns?

Lovelock sees no problem whatever with storing the waste. He says:   

One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated with radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife.  This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States' Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War.

Therefore, with the wildlife serving as our canaries in the coal mines, and with humans being the ones who are afraid of the waste, the solution easily suggests itself.    The waste can be stored in places that badly need protection from those who would destroy them for commercial purposes, like the tropical forests, thus hitting two birds with one stone.

If there were any doubts of Lovelock's personal commitment to this view, more than any other passage in his concise little book, "The Revenge of Gaia," the following astonishing statement, made I am sure not at all with his tongue in his cheek, shows exactly where he stands on this very difficult and important issue:

...I have offered, in public, to accept all of the high-level waste produced in a year from a nuclear power station for deposit on my small plot of land; it would occupy a space about a cubic metre in size and fit safely in a concrete pit, and I would use the heat from its decaying radioactive elements to heat my home.  It would be a waste not to use it.  More important, it would be no danger to me, my family or the wildlife.

As for accidents and meltdowns, Lovelock thinks the incidents that have happened, along with what could happen, have been badly overblown in the public perceptions, and along the way he trashes one of my favorite movies, "The China Syndrome," with that stellar job done by Jack Lemmon in an uncharacteristic, serious role.

All this is a very attractive view of things, and it creates a powerful temptation  to think, why not?   After all, to take just two countries that have deeply committed themselves to nuclear power, France and Japan are widely perceived to be (with some lapses of course) full of sensible people who are deeply into self-preservation. Yet, with not nearly the amount of real estate of the U.S., they have nuclear power stations all over the place, any one of which, were it to blow up to the degree against which we have been repeatedly warned, especially by a Greenpeacian named Harvey Wasserman, one of whose main things is a  series of fervent and always interesting articles attacking nuclear power, those two countries would essentially become null and void., for a while at least.  And meanwhile the event at Chernobyl and the less serious one at Three Mile Island continue to fade into history, along with all the other kinds of catastrophes.