Nuclear's Green
Ally
Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore on why he's promoting
nuclear power
What changed your mind about nukes?
The environmental movement made a mistake lumping nuclear energy in
with nuclear weapons. We did so out of unfounded fear. Chernobyl
killed 56 people, but tens of thousands die every year from
breathing coal emissions.
You also like that it can help curb global
warming.
Nuclear plays the most important role of any technology in reducing
carbon emissions. It creates 70 percent of the clean electricity in
the U.S.
But why not pursue wind and solar — carbon-free,
without the meltdowns?
Wind and solar are intermittent power. We can't run factories and
schools and hospitals on energy that can disappear for days at a
time.
How many reactors do you want to see
built?
The objective this century should be to triple the number of
nuclear plants to 300. If you want to eliminate coal completely,
you probably need more like 500 reactors.
But that would cost at least $4.5 trillion to
build.
Yeah, but that's over a long period of time.
You think we can buy our way out of the climate
crisis?
Absolutely.
And taxpayers would have to subsidize much of
it.
Look, when France builds a nuclear plant, taxpayers fund it 100
percent. The whole nuclear industry is publicly owned in France, as
it is in Canada and Russia and Japan.
So we should model our energy economy on
France?
Sweden is a good model: They're 50 percent nuclear, with one of the
lowest rates of CO2 emissions in Western Europe.
And what do we do about storing all the nuclear
waste?
People who don't want to live near nuclear facilities should
probably move.
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