James Lovelock Starting the Week January 31, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Environment,Green in the City , trackbackThanks to Hughes Views, I realise that James Lovelock was on Start the Week on Radio 4 yesterday, and just listened to him. His new book is due out on Thursday, so I’ll be reviewing it in the next couple of weeks.
Lovelock has controversially made the case for nuclear power, and it was interesting to hear him expound on that. His stance seems to be that, given that noone else is trying to do much about climate change we in Britain should do whatever we need to to preserve our civilisation, and so building nuclear power stations (and better flood defences on the Thames) should be top of our priorities, ahead of renewable energy sources, better insulation and all the things I’m always advocating.
When challenged on the safety of nuclear power, he said that on a recent trip to Sellafield he had taken a geiger counter, measured the radiation there and found it to be no worse than in Devon which is, admitedly, an area of fairly high natural radiation. He also pointed out that in the wastelands of Chernobyl, plants are flourishing because humans dare not go there.
I have a lot of faith in Lovelock. He’s always been controversial, and sometimes his statements get seriously misunderstood as with the idea that Gaia theory means that the planet is somehow sentient, so its good to hear him directly. He’s not afraid to take a deeply unpopular position and defend it robustly. And he is sounding a wakeup call that is sorely needed.
I would like to ask him a questions though, and maybe they’ll be addressed in the book.
- Would he eat a salad made from the plants around Chernobyl, or a rabbit stew? Life persists in some very unpleasant places. As he himself has pointed out, what’s good for Gaia isn’t necessarily good for humans.
- Do not reasonable levels of radiation around Sellafield simply mean that, for the moment, the waste storage facility is doing its job? How likely is it that we will be able to keep that facility, or a better one, doing its job for the time it will take the contents to become safe?
If we had an open, transparent nuclear industry that was prepared to explain its actions clearly and assess the risks in a publc forum challenged by the brightest and best engineering minds available, then no doubt most people, including me, would go along with it. Until that unlikely day we are between the devil and, perhaps quite literally, the deep blue sea.
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