Embracing Nuclear Power

Stewart Brand, an Icon of Environmentalism, Talks About Embracing Nuclear Power
Andrew Bast | Oct 21, 2009 02:43 AM

When it comes to icons of the environmentalist movement, Stewart Brand ranks at the top of the list. Brand, 70, founded the Whole Earth Catalog, which helped to mold the counterculture of the 1970s. Today, though, he's just released a new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, in which he makes a U-turn into much of the movement's received wisdom. Perhaps the biggest about-face concerns his embrace of nuclear power. NEWSWEEK's Andrew Bast sat down with Brand in New York to talk about the atom, the environment, and the dire ramifications of napping on a tugboat. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Is nuclear power green?

BRAND: Yes. Having been careful not to look into nuclear power for many years, when I began considering it I thought it was green primarily in the context of greenhouse gases and climate change. But frankly, now I've gotten to the point now that even if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, greenhouse gases, and climate change were not significant issues, I would still probably be pro-nuclear. Because coal is so awful.

Is it fair to compare the remnants of coal-fired power plans with nuclear waste?

The waste from coal means gigatons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. There is also the fly ash, slurry, and all the rest of the stuff. The sheer quantities get to be overwhelming. Eighty rail cars a day of coal, each one weighing a hundred tons goes into a 1-gigawatt coal-fired plant, and that multiplies to 19,000 tons of carbon dioxide, every day. Compare that to one year of a 1-gigawatt nuclear plant, which puts out 20 tons of very dense nuclear waste that goes into dry cask storage. You know exactly where it is and you monitor it, and it's not doing anything bad. That's a pretty strong contrast.

In the book, you tally up the anti-nuke environmentalists who have changed their minds. Is there a definitive line in the environmental movement to embrace nuclear power?

You can name the prominent figures on two hands and two feet. The one I like, because it is so clear, is Stephen Tydnall in Britain, who was head of Greenpeace there. Today, Britain is headed toward an environmentally permitted, if not actually encouraged, nuclear renaissance. And they've got France right across the channel selling them 2 gigawatts a year of nuclear electricity!

You were trained originally as an ecologist, so maybe it's easy for you to think about long eras like 10,000 years. But for many people, whether it's nuclear power plants, waste from coal-fired plants, or climate change, it's hard to think beyond much more than the time they've got before, well, they're part of the earth, too.

If we got most of civilization comfortable thinking in a hundred-year time frame, that would be a fantastic victory. Climate change may do this. But that is jumping up from a situation where people can barely think seriously about a decade at a time. Mostly we're focusing on the next quarter, the next election, and that's fine. But one of the things we hire government and scientists to do is to step outside that time frame, bear it in mind, operate within it, but keep the century in mind.

Comment

France either HAS, or is developing, a method to recycle the spent uranium rods. IF that were to become possible, and the problem with those rods were to disappear, or diminish significantly, nuclear would take on more prominence.