Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Greenpeace founder goes nuclear

He still buys into the climate change dogma, but Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, lays out a good case for building more nuclear power plants in the US.
In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.

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And although I don't want to underestimate the very real dangers of nuclear technology in the hands of rogue states, we cannot simply ban every technology that is dangerous. That was the all-or-nothing mentality at the height of the Cold War, when anything nuclear seemed to spell doom for humanity and the environment. In 1979, Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon produced a frisson of fear with their starring roles in "The China Syndrome," a fictional evocation of nuclear disaster in which a reactor meltdown threatens a city's survival. Less than two weeks after the blockbuster film opened, a reactor core meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant sent shivers of very real anguish throughout the country.
The no-nuke movement is all about fear...not one nuclear power plant has been built in the US since.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

He's been on the pro-nuke power trip for a while now... Which is why he gets "disdain" from his former colleagues.

Yeah, he's a climate change believer, but it makes his support for nuclear generation make sense.