It only took Patrick Moore 35 years to learn what most people have known all along:
In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
Look at it this way: More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions -- or nearly 10 percent of global emissions -- of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely.
Every argument Mr. Moore adduces in the rest of this article in support of nuclear power has been in circulation for over three decades. They're certainly not new. Meanwhile, because of the efforts of radical environmentalists like him, our energy efforts have focussed on carbon-based fuels which have filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and acid and lined the pockets of Arab sheiks. When future historians consider the number of lives lost because of pollution and the toll taken by terrorism funded by oil-rich Muslims; when they consider the economic cost of both the damage caused by pollution and the attempts to control it; when they consider that a relatively clean and cheaper (in the long run) method of energy production was all the while available in nuclear fission, they will shake their heads at our stupidity.
We can be happy that Mr. Moore has finally seen the light, but we're entitled to ask, what took him so long?
