Lynas: How nuclear power can save the planet

The location for this year’s Camp for Climate Action – outside the Kingsnorth power station in Kent – was well chosen: it is here that E.ON wants to build the first new coal-fired plant in the UK in nearly 30 years. With coal the most global-warming-intensive fuel on the market, and six more coal plants in the pipeline if Kingsnorth gets the go-ahead, there is a clear line to be drawn in the sand.

But the Kent protesters are not the only ones banging the drum against coal. Dr James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies and probably the best-known climato logist alive, has been travelling the globe trying to persuade politicians that the best way to rein in future climate change is by a rapid phase-out of coal-burning power stations.
Hansen’s message is unpalatable to governments because he states his points bluntly and with constant references to irrefutable scientific evidence. “A strategy based on 20 per cent, 50 per cent or 80 per cent CO2 emission reduction is doomed to failure,” he asserts, because of the long atmospheric lifetime of carbon dioxide (a significant fraction hangs around for 1,000 years or more). It is the total carbon input to the atmosphere that counts, not the time taken to burn it. Yet emissions reduction is the only strategy talked about at the global level. A more realistic approach would be to adopt a “production cap” – as advocated by Oliver Tickell in his current book Kyoto2 – and mine only as much fossil fuel as the planet can withstand us burning. The long-term objective, over a century or so, is to reduce carbon levels to 350 parts per million at most (they are at 385ppm and rising fast), but that is something no leading politician is yet prepared to contemplate.

Hansen is a self-declared “agnostic” on nuclear power, a topic which recently landed the writer George Monbiot in hot water when he admitted in his Guardian environment column that he “no longer cared” if nuclear power was part of the answer. The article upset many in the environmental movement. I would take a stronger position myself: that increased use of nuclear (an outright competitor to coal as a deliverer of baseload power) is essential to combat climate change, but clearly there need to be some signi ficant technical advances in nuclear fission if it is to become acceptable to many in the west.

New Statesman