Bush wants to go nucular
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Posted on May 25, 2006
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Today from Margaret Swedish:
President Bush yesterday said the solution to the greenhouse gas problem is to build more nuclear power plants – more and more of them — hundreds of them.
Deep ecologist James Lovelock said the same thing, causing great controversy in the environmental movement. Lovelock says we have much more to fear from global warming than from nuclear waste and potential accidents (remember Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, the disastrous record of the Hanford WA plant). The energy is clean in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but it is a gamble, no doubt. And we have yet to resolve the issue of waste.
In any case, it takes years — a decade or more — to get one of these up and running, and doing it hurriedly will only increase the danger. But it would certainly benefit the already-entrenched energy industry — lots of government subsidies and tax breaks that could be going instead to alternative energy development and conservation.
And I am not exactly comforted when Mr. Bush states that the nuclear energy industry is "overregulated." Wow. Radiioactivity that can kill millions, waste that if mishandled or erroneously released, can cause damage that last tens of thousands of years. Overregulated.
I give you, here, a link to a thoughtful and eloquent response to Lovelock, and hence to this whole question of whether or not to go nuclear– one in which George Monbiot suggests that we do not need to choose between a lesser and greater mass death, that we can instead choose life.
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