SeekerBlog

On the Newsweek blog, don’t miss the Stewart Brand interview:

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NEWSWEEK: Is nuclear power green?

BRAND: Yes. Having been careful not to look into nuclear power for many years, when I began considering it I thought it was green primarily in the context of greenhouse gases and climate change. But frankly, now I’ve gotten to the point now that even if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, greenhouse gases, and climate change were not significant issues, I would still probably be pro-nuclear. Because coal is so awful.

Is it fair to compare the remnants of coal-fired power plans with nuclear waste?

The waste from coal means gigatons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. There is also the fly ash, slurry, and all the rest of the stuff. The sheer quantities get to be overwhelming. Eighty rail cars a day of coal, each one weighing a hundred tons goes into a 1-gigawatt coal-fired plant, and that multiplies to 19,000 tons of carbon dioxide, every day. Compare that to one year of a 1-gigawatt nuclear plant, which puts out 20 tons of very dense nuclear waste that goes into dry cask storage. You know exactly where it is and you monitor it, and it’s not doing anything bad. That’s a pretty strong contrast.

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Is there any hope for the upcoming climate change summit in Copenhagen?

Focusing on the nuclear issue, I would trust that they will not make the Kyoto mistake of refusing to give carbon credits to nuclear power.

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Please continue reading Newsweek blog…

For more depth on Stewart Brand and his proposed solutions see Dan Yurman’s post Stewart Brand goes nuclear:

Whole Earth Discipline is what book publishers like to call “myth shattering” because it presents counterintuitive observations on why cities are actually greener than countryside, how nuclear power is the future of energy, and why genetic engineering is the key to crop and land management.

Brand says the environmental movement must figure out how to come to terms with fast-moving science and take up the tools and discipline of engineering. Brand was trained as an ecologist at Stanford University so he comes to this point of view with impeccable credentials. That doesn’t stop the critics.

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