Patrick Moore: Going nuclear over global warming

For years the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations has warned us that greenhouse gas emissions from our fossil fuel consumption threaten the world's climate in ways we will regret. This year IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts.

It is the IPCC that my former colleagues in Greenpeace, and most of the mainstream environmental movement, look to for expert advice on climate change. Environmental activists take the rather grim but measured language of the IPCC reports and add words like "catastrophe" and "chaos," along with much speculation concerning famine, pestilence, mass extinction and the end of civilization as we know it.

Until the past couple of years, the activists, with their zero-tolerance policy on nuclear energy, have succeeded in squelching any mention by the IPCC of using nuclear power to replace fossil fuels for electricity production. Burning fossil fuels for electricity accounts for 9.5 billion tons of global carbon dioxide emissions while nuclear emits next to nothing. It has been apparent to many scientists and policymakers for years that this would be a logical path to follow. The IPCC has now joined these growing ranks advocating for nuclear energy as a solution.

In its recently issued final report for 2007, the IPCC makes a number of unambiguous references to the fact that nuclear energy is an important tool to help bring about a reduction in fossil fuel consumption. Greenpeace has already made it clear that it disagrees. How credible is it for activists to use the IPCC scientists' recommendations to fuel apocalyptic fundraising campaigns on climate change and then to dismiss the recommendations from the same scientists on what we should do to solve it?

Greenpeace is deliberately misleading the public into thinking that wind and solar, both of which are inherently intermittent and unreliable, can replace baseload power that is continuous and reliable. Only three technologies can produce large amounts of baseload power: fossil fuels, hydroelectric and nuclear. Given that we want to reduce fossil fuels and that potential hydroelectric sites are becoming scarce, nuclear is the main option. But Greenpeace and its allies remain in denial despite the fact that many independent environmentalists and now the IPCC see the situation clearly.

I have long realized that in retrospect we made a big mistake in the early years of Greenpeace when we lumped nuclear energy together with nuclear weapons as if they were all part of the same holocaust. We were totally fixated, and rightly so, on the threat of all-out nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, and we thought everything nuclear was evil. We failed to distinguish the beneficial and peaceful uses of nuclear technology from its destructive and even evil uses.

The approach would be akin to including nuclear medicine with nuclear weapons just because nuclear medicine uses radioactive materials, most of which are produced in nuclear reactors. Nuclear medicine successfully diagnoses and treats millions of people every year, and it would be ludicrous to ban its use.

Greenpeace and company are basically stuck in the 1970s when it comes to their energy policy as it relates to climate change. They should accept the wisdom of the scientists at the IPCC and recognize that nuclear energy is a big part of the climate change solution. And they should stop misleading the public into thinking that wind and solar can do the job on their own. I will be the first to commend them for their courage.

About the writer:

• Patrick Moore is a cofounder and former leader of Greenpeace. He is chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. (www.greenspiritstrategies.com), in which he serves as a paid adviser to the nuclear power industry.