Thursday, August 16, 2007

Nuclear will produce as much CO2 as fossil fuel plants

This argument, as we have pointed out many times already on this very blog, will run and run.

In an admittedly fairly lengthy video clip from E&ENews On-Point show, Nuclear Policy Research Institute founder Helen Caldicott discusses her new book, and makes a claim that as uranium ore gets scarcer then the equivalent CO2 output of a nuclear plant will increase and eventually equate to the CO2 output of a fossil fuel plant.

At one point she claims that "the nuclear industry lies"! She also claims that terrorists could very easily cause a nuclear plant meltdown!

So what many of us viewed as a stop-gap technology is perhaps as nasty at CO2 emission as fossil fuel power plants?

Now I'm confused even more!

When the best choice is less choice?

The title is taken from an interview with Jonathan Porritt - full detail from NewConsumer.com.

As ever with Porritt, the article is well worth a read, making lots of very salient points on our full blown consumerism and how we may have to change our ways.

"But the truth is that in the rich world very large numbers of us need to get used to consuming less. That’s just inevitable, we will either have to do so because our carbon budgets won’t be big enough to sustain our patterns of consumption – and everything has a carbon price tag attached to it – or because more and more people will recognise that that’s part of the responsibility of living on a shared earth – we have to make the limited resources available to all, not just the lucky ones living in rich countries like ours."

Anybody want to argue with that?