Dr. Patrick Moore

Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace and a world-renowned environmentalist, is currently  Co-Chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition  and a vocal advocate of nuclear power (the other Co-Chair is Christine Todd Whitman, former EPA Administrator).  As increased nuclear power has not been a focus of the movement to reduce fossil fuel emissions, the B-GC spoke to him to understand his perspective.  He makes some very strong arguments that nuclear power has to be part of the solution.

What follows is a slightly abridged and edited version of the interview.

:    Though one of the original founders of Greenpeace, you are now  Co-Chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, an advocacy group for nuclear power.  This seems like a big switch.  Could you comment on why and when you became a strong supporter of nuclear power?

Dr.  Moore : It is a big switch, but the reason I made the change in my position is that I realized we made a big mistake in the early years of the environmental movement.  We lumped nuclear energy in with nuclear weapons as everything nuclear was evil.  Our original focus in Greenpeace was stopping nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons testing.  We saw nuclear as being associated with death and destruction and the all out holocaust that would happen if war broke out with the Soviet Union.  I think it was an honest mistake at the time, but it was certainly a mistake.  As someone said, there would be a lot fewer coal plants and a lot more nuclear plants in the US today if it wasn’t for the environmental movement.

I think it is fairly clear that the environmental movement is more focused on coal today than it is on nuclear because it sees coal as a more dangerous technology for both the climate and air pollution.  Even though nuclear does create waste, that waste is very successfully contained – it is not leaking out, it is not harming anybody.  On the other hand, emissions from fossil fuel combustion for energy and transportation are harming people.  So I think I have arrived at a more logical and science-based conclusion, and I feel much more comfortable with this position.

Nuclear energy is currently supplying 75% of the clean electricity in the US, and hydroelectric is supplying over 20% of the clean electricity, and yet my old friends in Greenpeace are still against nuclear and hydroelectric.  To me, a student of logic and science, this is a complete disconnect and makes no sense whatsoever.

I spent the last 20 years on sustainability issues, and when climate change became the dominant environmental concern I started thinking about what was a realistic way in which we could reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.  It became very clear that nuclear and hydro are the two key technologies that can actually provide base load 24/7 power as alternatives to fossil fuels, and so about 10 years ago I made the switch.  Hydro has been built out to its maximum potential in the US, but you can find a place that is suitable for a nuclear plant in almost any state in the US.  If you recognize the fact that wind and solar are intermittent sources of power and are simply not capable of replacing coal-fired plants or gas plants, then nuclear is the only real option we actually have.  It is fairly simple.  It is either fossil fuel or nuclear.

:   Do you still favor investing in other renewable energy sources?  That is solar, wind, geothermal?

Dr.  Moore : I am very strongly in favor of ground source heatpumps, otherwise known as geothermal heat pumps, which you know is different than the hot rocks kind of electricity generating geothermal that they have in California.  Geothermal electricity is very regionalized in nature.  There are only a few places where the earth’s crust is warm enough, close enough to the surface to tap into it.  But I am very much in favor of ground source heat pumps as a source of renewable energy.

Image provide by CASEnergy

No matter how many times the solar and wind people say so, the fact of the matter is the sun doesn’t shine at night or when it is cloudy, and the wind doesn’t blow all the time. You can’t run factories and businesses and schools on electricity technology that disappears for three or four days at a time.  It would simply be disruptive  to such an extent that we would not have civilization as we know it.  You forget how much electricity underlies our existing civilization and way of life.  Intermittent electricity would be a rather different world than having 24/7 baseload power.

Wind has a role to play, but you may have noticed that T. Boone Pickens has cancelled his wind project.  He is backing away from the concept and the reality, and he did so because of economics.  And that is the problem with wind – it is the economics.  Including the transmission requirements, wind costs 2 or 3 times as much as conventional energy, and the competitiveness of the US economy depends on low energy costs.  You can’t just double the energy costs and expect to continue to be a competitive economy in the world.  I agree that wind has a role to play but it is not a very large role because it is intermittent.  Every time you build a wind farm you have to make sure there is something reliable to back it up, so you have to build something else like a gas plant.  That was sort of the T. Boone Picken’s plan.  He had the wind-gas plan, but now he just has the gas plan.

On the other hand, solar panels are 10 to 20 times as expensive in terms of cost/kwh.  I personally do not believe they belong on the grid.  They are best suited for off-grid applications, such as highway signs, etc, where you don’t have electricity and you do not need very much.

: Currently, the US operates 104 nuclear plants that generate about 20% of its requirements.  What is your specific goal?  How many new plants or what fraction of the US’s future energy requirements do you believe should come from nuclear power?

Dr.  Moore : As a minimum, nuclear should at least hold its own at 20%, and that would mean building dozens of new nuclear plants over the next 40 years or so, maybe as many as 90 or 100.  There will be 120 million more people in the US by 2040 and, despite our best efforts at efficiency and conservation, population and economic growth will increase demand.

To stop the increase of fossil fuel emissions, our goal would be to increase the share of nuclear, though CASEnergy has not targeted a specific number.

: Environmentalists who claim climate change as the major and overriding environmental threat today, do not support nuclear power as part of the solution because of concerns about nuclear waste.  Do you feel that this concern is overstated?  Are there new, effective solutions to this problem?

Dr.  Moore : First off, it isn’t really a problem at the present time.  It is not leaking out, it is safely and securely contained, and, as I said before, it is not harming anyone.  It is not like cars, which are killing tens of thousands of people every year. It is a totally controlled situation with no damage being done to anything.  We are quite capable of making containers for the spent fuel, and we are quite capable of repackaging the used fuel  if and when the existing containers need to be replaced.  We are also capable of recycling used nuclear fuel (for more info on spent fuel recycling click Read More) as France has been doing for thirty years.  Japan has just built a $30 billion facility to recycle their used nuclear fuel.  About 95% of the energy is still in that spent fuel and we can extract that and use it.  There are thousands of years of nuclear energy if we recycle the used fuel.  The US has to get back into the recycling industry, which they quit during the Carter administration.  The US was the world’s leader in this at one time.  That was a long time ago, but it is time to get back in it.  Anyone who is thinking about this in a positive way, about how to move forward, includes recycling as part of the plan.

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