Staying cool? Thank nuclear power – by Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail – July 18, 2013)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Hot out, isn’t it? At least for some of us, anyway. Southern Ontario is sweltering in temperatures that have soared into the 30s. Toronto has declared an extreme heat alert, and the air conditioners are running at full blast.

Thank god for air conditioning. Or rather, thank nuclear power – that’s what’s keeping us cool. Wednesday morning at 7 a.m., Ontario’s nuclear plants were generating more than half of the province’s electricity: 11,148 megawatts. Gas, hydro and coal accounted for another 8,608 MW. Wind power, at 97 MW, barely moved the dial. Those mighty turbines (for which we will be paying dearly for many years to come) contributed less than half of 1 per cent of the total power output.

Of course, wind energy is green. But so is nuclear. Unlike coal and natural gas, nuclear power creates zero greenhouse gas emissions.

“Nuclear energy is the most powerful weapon in the war on global warming,” Steve Aplin, an Ottawa-based consultant in energy and the environment, told me in a phone interview. He points out that if Ontario’s environmental lobby had succeeded in having nuclear power replaced by natural gas, the province’s carbon dioxide emissions would have soared.

But wait! Nuclear plants are dangerous. After the disasters at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima, surely nobody could seriously argue that nuclear power is the way ahead.

In fact, the peril of nuclear is one of the great myths of our time. Chernobyl, a disastrously designed reactor, has killed just 56 people so far, according to the United Nations. Three Mile Island and Fukushima have killed none. Engineering has taken many leaps ahead. Today, nuclear is the safest form of power that we have, next to wind.

Some of the world’s leading environmentalists have taken a good hard look at nuclear and changed their minds. They now believe that nuclear power is the only effective way to curb greenhouse gas emissions as the world continues to industrialize.

“Cheap, clean energy is the world’s most important development goal,” says Michael Schellenberger, an environmental policy expert. He is one of the environmentalists who features in Pandora’s Promise, a new documentary that might well make some people think again about nuclear. Unlike every other energy source, it’s both cheap and clean.

Mr. Schellenberger, who heads the influential Breakthrough Institute, believes in real solutions, not phony ones. An example of a phony solution is to just have us all cut back on energy use – which is fine only if we’re content to leave the rest of the world suffering in abject poverty.

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