Earth Equity News

NYTimes' Tierney: Nuclear Foes Should Get with the Times. Commentary by John Tierney, October 6, 2008. "The presidential candidates claim to see America's energy future, but their competing visions have a certain vintage quality. They've revived that classic debate: the hard path versus the soft path. The soft path, as Amory Lovins defined it in the 1970s, is energy conservation and power from the sun, wind and plants -- the technologies that Senator Barack Obama emphasizes in his plan to reduce greenhouse emissions. Senator John McCain is more enthusiastic about building nuclear power plants, the quintessential hard path. As a rule, it's not a good idea to revive anything from the 1970s. But this debate is the exception, and not just because the threat of global warming has raised the stakes. The old lessons are as good a guide as any to the future, as William Tucker argues in Terrestrial Energy, his history of the hard-soft debate... It would be risky to bet everything on nuclear power as the answer to global warming. But it seems even riskier to bet on just the soft path, as so many greens are doing, either by flatly opposing nuclear power or by setting so many conditions that no plants could be built for decades, if ever. 'The nuclear debate is still stuck back in the 1980s,' says Mr. Tucker... If people started associating nuclear plants with natural radioactive processes in the Earth instead of atomic bombs, he says, they might be persuaded that it's the most environmentally benign form of energy, particularly compared with wind farms that cover scenic ridges and the vast solar arrays proposed for 'empty' land in deserts... He argues that the risks of terrorist attacks and nuclear waste have been exaggerated... If there's already a proven technology that doesn't spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, why fiddle while coal burns?" [Editor's note: CCC finds absurd the notion that nuclear power is the "the most environmentally benign form of energy." We are strong advocates for the "soft path."]