The Environment: Nuclear power!

Last week, the Finnish government greenlit the construction of two new nuclear power plants. I consider this a signal victory for environmentalism and security.

First of all, this transforms the balance of payments of the Finnish electricity grid, so to speak. At the moment, Finland is more dependent on imported electricity than any other European country. Some of it comes from Scandinavia, but the majority of the electricity we import comes from Russia. That isn't a nice situation to be in for purposes of security policy. The new nuclear plants will end Finland's energy dependence on Russia.

Secondly, and much more importantly, they will finally allow Finland to stop using fossil fuels for electricity generation, thus making the most important contribution to diminishing global warming that we can. As I explained earlier, power generation is the biggest single source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

Predictably, the Finnish "environmental" movement is up in arms over this. The Green party, which is currently in government as part of a coalition, has protested strongly, but like they always do, has done nothing but protest. I thought I should address this, as opposing nuclear power is, to me, the most illogical and senseless part of the "environmental" movement.

Basically there are two kinds of renewable energy, "old renewables" (mainly hydroelectric power) and "new renewables" (solar, wind, tidal and geothermal energy, to name a few). Of these, we're utilizing hydroelectric power pretty much to its maximum extent. The ecological effects of dams are so profound that it's hard to see any developed countries building any more of them. As for the new renewables, at the moment, they're a pipe dream. They're the energy generation means of the future, sure, but that future is a long time and a gigantic investment in R&D and plant away. To stick with our example, Finland, at the moment none of the new renewables are cost-effective. All Finnish wind power generation runs at a net loss and must be heavily subsidized by the government.

To convert current electricity production from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is, if not completely impossible, far too expensive to contemplate. In the alternative, our energy policy options are either continuing to burn fossil fuels or replacing them with nuclear power. With a (slowly) growing population and a growing economy, we can't very well reduce electricity consumption by the kind of amounts it would take to get rid of Finland's electricity deficit and stop using fossil fuels.

The safety hazards of nuclear power plants in normal operation are grossly exaggerated, but the problem of nuclear waste is real. Interestingly, the problem could be very much reduced if we used nuclear fuel more efficiently, but that's a topic for another time. However, nuclear waste is a much smaller problem than global warming. Anti-nuclear campaigners make much of the horror of leaving nuclear waste to future generations. What about leaving them a world that's at about the same temperature as this one? Surely the consequences of runaway global warming are infinitely worse than those of a very minute amount of nuclear waste?

It's this failure to prioritize that I find most galling about the current "environmental" movement, by which I mean Greenpeace and their ilk. The inordinate attention they pay to the problem of nuclear waste nicely obscures the greater problem: how will we generate electricity without using fossil fuels? I stress, again, that renewable energy sources like solar power are simply not practicable yet.

The only current alternative to building nuclear power is continuing to use fossil fuels. Not only does burning fossil fuels for electricity generation make the largest single human contribution to the greenhouse effect, but in normal, day-to-day operation, coal plants kill people. They produce air pollution that shortens the expected lifespan of everyone living around them.

So the question is, really: do we want to stick with a form of power generation that not only kills people through air pollution but also makes a huge contribution to global warming, or build nuclear power? By taking the latter route, Finland will be able to entirely stop burning fossil fuels for electricity generation. That is a huge step toward doing our part to mitigate the effects of global warming. And it's only possible with nuclear power.

At the same time, it must be done despite the active campaigning of Greenpeace and the Finnish green movement. In my opinion, their opposition to nuclear power is nothing more than a cheap popularity stunt to capitalize on technophobia and old Cold War-era fears of nuclear annihilation, which have nothing whatsoever to do with nuclear power. It's an excellent example of how the Green movement is no longer an environmental movement, because in this case, they are allocating considerable funds and energies toward fighting against the only form of power generation that does not contribute to global warming.

In short, while preaching the dangers of global warming, the Green movement opposes the phasing out of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. How is that environmentalism?