Interview: James Lovelock on Climate Change

I think that nuclear energy has to evolve in the way all energy systems evolve, and I’m very pleased to see that the latest nuclear plants (one is now being built in South Africa) are small scale plants that provide just enough electricity for a small region. They are the so-called pebble bed reactors: they’re quite small, quite safe and very suitable. We should remember that the very first nuclear reactors that supplied energy were built in Britain in the 1950’s in three and a half years. One or two of them are still working.

FS: But what about the problem of nuclear waste?

JL: Personally, and I’m supported in this by no less a dignitary than Hans Blix, what’s all this fuss about nuclear waste? There’s hardly any, and that is the point.

Last Christmas, my wife and I were invited to Sellafield, which is the British depository of nuclear waste. We walked around the plant and found that the radiation level (which I measured with a handheld monitor of mine, not one that had been supplied) was about the same as it is here, in other words, completely safe. Around the building, where 40 years of all of Britain’s civil and military nuclear waste was stored, the radiation level rose to just above that in the streets of St Ives, which is still absolutely harmless although it happens to be in a rather uranium-rich area. All of the waste in that building, and it wasn’t a very large building, is in the form of blocks of glass that have been fused. If you froze or fixed the carbon dioxide waste we produce each year into something like magnesium carbonate, it would make a mountain one mile high and 12 miles in circumference every year. Now that is truly deadly and will kill nearly all of us if we go on doing it.

FS: Could nuclear power be used for transport?

JL: If you go to France and much of Europe, you are riding in trains that are powered by nuclear electricity. The French have been very sensible, they run almost everything on nuclear energy. The very Greens who scream about its dangers are mostly wealthy people who have second homes in France, but they don’t seem to notice this, such is the perversity of people.

You couldn’t have a nuclear-powered car with a nuclear motor in it, but what you can do is run it on batteries. It won’t be long before all cars are running on batteries that can be charged from nuclear electricity. Planes will take longer.