Nuclear Delusions

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.