On Nuclear power

It saddens me that we in the greens continue to be so adamantly against nuclear power generation. The arguments against it on the basis of the links between its technologies and nuclear warfare are clouding us from seeing nuclear power as the greenest electricity generation technology of all.

Without a question, no ifs and or buts, nuclear warfare would be disastrous for all of Gaia. Any global conflict involving atom or hydrogen bombs will destroy not only our civilisation, but the capacity of the earth to maintain current life. Nuclear winter would deny all photosynthesis for a long enough time that most plant forms would die; without plants most animal and insect forms including microbial would be unable to survive. Nuclear fallout would finish off those that did manage to survive, through radiation sickness and biological mutations.

However we proceed we desperately need to curtail the proliferation of nuclear weapons in a world increasingly filled with sociopaths in political positions, the west far from excluded.

But this is not what nuclear power is about. Nuclear power is the cleanest and greenest of power sources of all. Quite apart from being the only source of the energy of all that is on the earth, deriving from the sun, and from being the source of the heat internally in the earth, nuclear energy, pound for pound is millions of times more effective than any other known form of fuel -- E = mc^2 after all.

We would be idiots to ignore it.

And indeed we havent. 41% of Ontario's power comes from nuclear. Somewhere around 80% of France's electricity comes from nuclear, and the UK is around 25%.

If we were to lose our nuclear generation facilities we would be in the dark. The cost to our current way of life would be inestimable. A disaster.

I call for a healthy debate and reassessment of our policies on this issue.