I should like to congratulate Mick Hick on his excellent Viewpoint article: "Is nuclear power the answer to global warming?" (Cobourg Daily Star, August 19, 2005). It is time for more people to speak out against the irrational fears that stop us from pursuing the one course which might save this planet. Hick made a brief reference to melting ice caps blocking "the thermal conveyor taking warm water to Europe". Indeed, this risk of Abrupt Climate Change (covered in the National Research Council's 2002 Report to the U.S. Congress) is seriously under-reported in the media. We are not talking about a one degree slow rise every century (a gradualist scenario which is easy for the public to dismiss) but an unacceptable risk that in the lifetime of today's young people the Gulf Stream might shut down very suddenly and 90% of Europe's population starve to death -- with the inevitable social and military upheavals such a disaster would cause. The principal way to prevent this catastrophe is to stop burning fossil fuels -- and the only viable means of doing this is to produce electric power through nuclear generation (and perhaps hydrogen fuel cells for cars from nuclear-generated electricity as well). One of Canada's nuclear reactors avoids the emission of about 5 million tons of carbon dioxide each year -- the equivalent of that produced by 5 million Canadian motor vehicles.

British scientist James Lovelock (originator of the Gaia Hypothesis) refers, in his Introduction to Bruno Comby's book Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy, to his childhood, when otherwise intelligent men and women "fearfully avoided places said to be haunted." Lovelock concludes that such irrational fears still persist but attached to new objects, such as "nuclear power plants that seem to stir the dread that in the past was felt about a moonlit graveyard thought to be infested with werewolves and vampires." Lovelock has commented elsewhere that he is indeed "green" and he wishes his green-minded friends would stop their wrong-headed opposition to nuclear power.

Any of your readers wishing more information on "The Case for Nuclear Power" might refer to a website by a non-profit group (of which I am a member) at http://www.publicpowerforontario.ca/NuclearCase.html.

Rod Anderson / Cobourg

This letter was published in the
Aug 23/05 issue of the
Cobourg Daily Star