Anti-nuke sees the light, wakes up and supports nuclear powerexpansion

He's still an envirokook, but at least he's heading in a proper
direction.

Nuclear power's time has come
STORY HIGHLIGHTS

* After decades as a foe of nuclear power, Stewart Brand now
believes strongly in it
* He says the nuclear waste disposal problem has basically been
solved
* Brand says danger of low-level radiation has been exaggerated
* Nuclear power is proven way to reduce greenhouse gases and
replace coal-burning, he says

RELATED TOPICS

* Nuclear Energy
* Electricity Generation
* Nuclear Proliferation
* Technology

(CNN) -- For decades, pioneering environmentalist Stewart Brand, the
founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, opposed the use of
nuclear power. Now he sees it as vital to efforts to combat climate
change.

Earlier this month, Brand made the case for nuclear power in a debate
with Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson at the TED Conference
in Long Beach, California. (TED is a nonprofit that stands for
technology, information and design and is dedicated to "Ideas worth
spreading.")

His outspoken support for nuclear power comes as the White House has
been pushing for the first new nuclear plants in the United States in
three decades. Last week, President Obama announced $8.3 billion in
loan guarantees for adding two nuclear reactors at an existing plant
in Burke County, Georgia, near Augusta.

Mark Jacobson says nuclear power is too risky

Brand says his turnabout began in 2002, when the Global Business
Network, a consulting organization he co-founded, did a project on
climate change for the U.S. Secretary of Defense. In an interview with
CNN.com, Brand said the project showed him that the globe's climate
can change abruptly: "It goes over some tipping point and suddenly
you're in a situation that you don't like and you can't go back. That
got me way more concerned about climate as a clear and present danger
than I had been."

Looking for a surefire way to cut greenhouse gases, Brand said the
alternative to burning coal became clear: "We already had a very good
supplier of ...electricity. It worked like mad and was as clean as it
could be -- and that was nuclear.

"Looking at nuclear more closely made me look at coal more closely and
I got to realizing what a horror it was across the board, and as I
learned more about nuclear, I started learning all this stuff that my
fellow environmentalists had been careful not to let me know about."

Read about Bill Gates' argument for nuclear power

Brand spoke to CNN.com Wednesday. Here is an edited transcript:

CNN: What did your fellow environmentalists get wrong about nuclear
power?

Stewart Brand: Well, things like, nuclear radiation is a terrible
thing that we must all fear at any scale, and nuclear waste a thing
that we must be horrified about, with it lasting hundreds of thousands
of years and how dare we burden future generations with that. I
started looking at the basic scientific and engineering lore on both
those subjects. ...

They are interesting engineering problems that are mostly solved
already.

CNN: How have they been solved?

Brand: Anti-nuclear people have been saying, since Yucca Mountain [a
proposed nuclear waste repository in Nevada] won't work or can't work,
then you can't have nuclear. But then you think we do have nuclear, so
nuclear waste must be coming out of these reactors ... so where's it
going? It's going right there on the site in these dry cask storage
containers where it doesn't seem to bother anybody. You can go out and
look at them, stand next to them, no bad things happen.

So it's already de-demonized as you see it as not this huge
intractable problem. It's actually quite tractable and on a local
level. And carting the stuff around is treated as such a terrible
thing and "My God, what if there's an accident?"

And you look at the videos that were made at Sandia [National
Laboratory] years ago where they ran a locomotive into one of the
containers, and no bad thing happened, and then they burned it in jet
fuel, and no bad thing happened, dropped it from a great height, no
bad thing happened. You start to realize this is actually pretty well
in hand.

And the rest of the story on that is the next generation of reactors,
the so-called fourth-generation reactors, most of them use what we now
call nuclear waste as fuel. ... So a lot of the waste issue goes away
when you realize that a very good thing to do is to just park it
somewhere while we think about whether we do want to stick it in the
ground or use it in these fourth generation reactors.

One of the things I learned is that we've already been burying nuclear
waste in New Mexico at the waste isolation pilot plant for 10 years
now. Works fine. It's a salt formation 3,000 foot thick -- you go half
a mile down and that salt formation has been there for 250 million
years. It's not going anywhere. ... It's a perfectly good place to
stash this stuff if you want to get rid of it.

Environmentalists will say there's no working nuclear repository
anywhere in the world and you look and actually there's one being
built in Finland.

CNN: What about the potential for a release of radiation?

Brand: The requirement is that no more than 15 millirems of radiation
gets out to the public a year, and when a lady goes to get a mammogram
she gets twice that. When you move from Connecticut to Colorado, the
background radiation goes up five times that. And in medicine, we
routinely use radioactive isotopes for a whole manner of diagnostic
procedures, for x-rays and CT scans. ...

Then you look at the medical studies, the epidemiology. People have
been looking for human harm from radiation for a long time, ever since
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it came as a surprise to me to learn,
there were no birth defects in children born to exposed parents in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the U.N. went to study the Chernobyl area
after the accident there, there were no birth defects turning up in
the women who had been pregnant during that exposure.

Meanwhile, some anti-nuclear organizations have been using horrifying
photographs of deformed babies with gross birth defects and saying
these were caused by Chernobyl. It's just a lie, so that's a little
alarming to see scare tactics like that based on nonscience.

Obviously you do not want to go and get close to nuclear fuel. On the
other hand, when you take the fuel out of the reactor and put it in
storage, 175 years, seven generations later, the radioactivity of that
fuel is one billionth of what it is when you took it out of the
reactors. This stuff actually has a half-life that is good. ...

Mercury doesn't have a half life, when mercury gets into the system,
it bioconcentrates to the point where we tell pregnant women not to
eat wild fish and shellfish because the mercury has accumulated,
mostly from coal burning. ...

CNN: What about nuclear proliferation, the potential for spread of
nuclear weapons due to greater use of nuclear power?

Brand: First of all you want to separate out nations where that's a
worry and where it's not a worry. China and India we really need to
have stop burning coal. ... Now is there a proliferation issue there?
Not really -- China and India have nuclear weapons.

The figure I quoted at TED was that 21 nations have nuclear power,
only seven have nuclear weapons, and in every case they got the
nuclear weapons first, then the nuclear power. Sweden has nuclear
power -- 40 percent of their power is from nuclear. Do we worry about
them having nuclear weapons? Probably not.

So then that leaves a few countries that we are concerned about. Iran
is one. Venezuela would like to be one. That's where Obama's program
for fuel banking, which was actually started in a very intelligent way
by the Bush administration, is the classic workaround. It's a thing
which lets you know basically where all the fissile material is going
in the countries that join the program.

....The great thing about nuclear weapons is when you downgrade the
weapons-grade uranium, you get very good nuclear fuel. That's what the
U.S. has been doing for 10 years with Russian nuclear weapons.

I love the symmetry of that. The very warheads that used to be
targeted at American cities to blow them up are now being used to
light them.

CNN: Some critics of nuclear power say that it takes so long to
license and build nuclear power plants it's not really a practical
alternative?

Brand: ...Things can be accelerated a lot. So one of the things the
U.S. is doing is separately licensing -- going through the whole
approval process -- reactor designs before they have to be figured out
in context of a particular site. ...

Then there used to be this long delay of getting site approval, but as
it happened, when we slowed down and stopped our reactor building in
the mid-1970s and early 1980s, most of the reactor sites already had
permission for additional reactors, so that part has already been
done. ...

Look, you're not going to cure greenhouse gases with nuclear, but
curing greenhouse gases without nuclear is approximately impossible.



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