Greenpeace Co-Founder Patrick Moore Thoughtfully Advocates Nuclear Power

You're a co-founder of Greenpeace. You're an internationally renowned ecologist and environmentalist. Now you believe nuclear power is the energy of the future. Elaborate on how all of these efforts have come together and how your attitude regarding climate change has changed.

I've had a couple of epiphanies in my time. The first one came when I was in University and found out about ecology. Back in the late '60s ecology was not known in the popular lexicon. It was an obscure academic discipline that really came to the forefront when environmentalism began in the late '60s. I was probably the first person to take a PhD in ecology in Canada at the University of British Columbia, starting in the 1968-69 academic year.

My second epiphany was in 1982 when I first heard the term "sustainable development." It didn't come into popular usage until 1987 when the UN's World Commission on Environment and Development published the report, "Our Common Future," in which the term "sustainable development" was used explicitly as a way of describing the kind of development we need to do in order not to damage the environment. That is what eventually caused me to leave Greenpeace: I wanted to get on the solution side of things and figure out how we make our industries and our civilization, as a whole, more compatible with the environment from which we get food, energy, and material.

I've come to define sustainability as continuing to obtain our food, energy, and the things we need to survive from the environment while, at the same time, working to reduce our negative impacts on the environment through changes to our practices and technologies. I don't buy into the myth that the more material, energy, and food we produce, automatically the more damage is done to the environment. It's very clear to me. The shift from coal-fired electricity to nuclear electricity simply makes sense from a purely environmental point of view.

You recently spoke at the VerdeXchange Green Marketmakers Conference and addressed the nuclear energy option. In doing so, Newsweek has labeled you as a sort of renegade against Greenpeace. Why do you believe nuclear energy to be such a crucial option for energy production?

The first point is that I recognize we made an error back then. In my mind, we made the mistake of lumping nuclear energy in with nuclear weapons as if everything nuclear was evil. It's understandable how that happened, even I, with a love of technology and science, fell into that same trap. We were afraid of nuclear war, and we became afraid of the whole idea of nuclear and radiation. In retrospect, that makes about as much sense as lumping nuclear medicine in with nuclear weapons, just because it's a nuclear technology.

The irrational fear of nuclear energy is still prevalent today. A lot of people have gotten over it. A lot of people have realized that in the 50 years that nuclear plants have been operating in the United States no one has been has injured by them. If it hadn't been for the fact that the Soviet Union was operating in a Cold War atmosphere and took a lot of shortcuts to save a lot of money, Chernobyl wouldn't have happened either. It could have easily been prevented, especially if they built a containment structure around it like all Western reactors have. Chernobyl gave nuclear energy a very bad name because it did kill people. Even if you add the deaths from Chernobyl into the history of nuclear energy, it is still one of the safest technologies we have ever invented.

California legislation on nuclear plants is predicated on concerns over safety and waste disposal. What steps have been made, particularly in France, in the disposal and recycling of waste that would be instructive for the United States and California?

Go to Cap de La Hague in France. It's possible to get a tour. Go to Rokkasho in Japan, where they centralized their whole nuclear fuel fabrication, enrichment, and recycling processes into one location. The French are running 22 of their 59 nuclear reactors on recycled fuel. To move forward in recycling it will be necessary to build this new technology, called a combined fission-fusion technology, which is being developed now. There are also fast reactors. There are a number of technologies that will make it possible to completely recycle used fuel and turn all uranium and plutonium into fission products with much shorter half lives.

It is hard to understand how some countries can be so isolated to what is happening in other countries. I like the example of Germany and France. They share a common border. They have been through war and peace over hundreds of years together. They know each other intimately. Yet, it's the difference between night and day with their energy policies. On one side you have France, which has 80 percent nuclear and about 10 percent hydroelectric. There is very little fossil fuel in its energy supply. They are in line with climate policy. They are in line with environmental and air pollution policy. It is the only country in Western Europe with large amounts of surplus electricity. They have now announced a second new nuclear plant and probably a third one. It's one of the lowest producers of CO2 per capita in Western Europe.

Right next door, Germany is one of the highest producers of CO2 per capita in Western Europe, despite all of the money they have wasted on wind and solar. They have put billions of dollars into wind and solar and haven't reduced their greenhouse gasses. Meanwhile, they are saying they are going to shut down all 22 of their nuclear reactors, which provide 25 percent of their electricity. What are they going to replace that with? They have announced that six to eight new coal power plants will be built in Germany, and yet they think they are the center of the green world. The only other alternative to coal is Russian gas, which they are also moving to in a big way. Unfortunately for Western Europe, every time they build a wind farm they have to build a gas plant to back it up. They have to import that gas from Russia. Every time they build a new plant it gives Russia an economic and political leverage. We saw that happen this winter with the gas being cut off for ten days. There is no reason why that can't happen in the future. Russia can basically blackmail Western Europe to pay the price they want.

The province of Ontario is about 50 percent reliant on nuclear power. Talk a little bit about the expansion opportunities for nuclear around the world and in North America. What is your take on the environment for new plants?

Over 200 new plants are on the drawing boards worldwide, somewhere between 30 and 32 in the United States. Ontario has made the decision to move forward on nuclear and they are in the process of determining which technologies to use on site at Lake Ontario. There are studies being done in both Alberta and Saskatchewan, looking toward a new nuclear build in those provinces that have never had nuclear. It's an imperative there. For example, Alberta has seven times the CO2 emissions per capita than Quebec, which is the lowest because it's 100 percent hydroelectric. Ontario also has a pretty good footprint. Eighty percent of electricity in Ontario is non-carbon, 50 percent is nuclear, and 30 percent is hydroelectric. Many of the other provinces, such as British Columbia and Manitoba, have hydroelectric power, whereas Alberta and Saskatchewan are nearly 100 percent fossil fuel. There are people there interested in stopping that continued increase of fossil fuel emissions. Alberta is home of the oil sands, which the activists like to call the tar sands. It is a major energy consuming process to get the oil out of the sand.

President Obama is here is Canada today for six hours or so and is being pushed very hard by the anti-oil activists to speak out against the Alberta oil sands. He is not going to do that, of course, because the United States gets over a million gallons of oil a day from there. When he was running he made some stronger statements, but I saw an interview the other day and he was pretty calm about the oil sands.

So renewables are a symptom of misplaced priorities?

It's a huge waste of resources. Some of it is extremely expensive. Germany priced it realistically to get people to install it. They pay 50 Eurocents for a kilowatt-hour, which is approximately 75 cents in the United States per kilowatt-hour for electricity. That's insane. Yet, the billions spent are still not producing one percent of Germany's electricity. In addition, solar is intermittent and is only available about 20 percent of the time. Just like with wind, any time you put in a solar farm you have to put in a gas plant to back it up. The problem with wind and solar is that they cannot be backed up with nuclear and coal. They could be backed up with hydro if it wasn't already being used for base load. You end up with the main choice being gas to back up wind and solar. If we keep building wind and solar in the way we have been, we're going to wonder where all the gas is going to come from and gas prices will move back up again.

You are challenging the conventional wisdom in the environmental movement, but the spirit of Greenspirit is consensus and collaboration. How have you managed to be a contrarian and a consensus builder given the politics of the green movement today?

My friend reminds me that if we agreed on everything there would be no need for the two of us. I find it a bit ironic that I have come to have quite different positions on many of the issues from an environmental point of view. I think I'm right. For example, I think I'm right that we should be growing more trees and using more wood, as opposed to Greenpeace's idea that appears to be cutting fewer trees and using less wood. Wood is the most abundant renewable material on earth. The less wood we use the more steel, concrete, and plastic we end up using. It's insane the LEED building standard discriminates against wood. So all these Platinum LEED buildings are all entirely made of steel and concrete. They get points for that somehow. I wrote an article titled "Where is the Green Steel?"