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His views on nuclear power are interesting. He thinks that nuclear is the only real solution to climate change. http://www.jameslovelock.org/nuclear-power-is-t
by sien 7y ago
His views on nuclear power are interesting. He thinks that nuclear is the only real solution to climate change.
http://www.jameslovelock.org/nuclear-power-is-the-only-green-solution/ http://www.jameslovelock.org/nuclear-power-is-the-only-green...
- DennisP 7y agoJames Hansen agrees. In his book Storms of My Grandchildren he advocates two solutions: fee-and-dividend, and advanced nuclear power. Various other climate scientists are on board too.
- mac01021 7y agoI agree too, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable holding expertise in climate science up as evidence that one knows best when it comes to such policy decisions. I'm an expert at automation. That means I have an excellent sense of what tasks can be automated and how soon, and of a lot of the societal consequences of technological progress, but that doesn't automatically qualify me to choose the best public policy to prevent the associated loss of jobs or help the people who get unemployed as a result.
- DennisP 7y agoIn the book, he said he talked to a lot of people who run power grids, asking how difficult it was to incorporate unpredictable power sources. He also learned a lot about the Integral Fast Reactor project. In any case, one thing climate scientists know better than anyone is the urgency of the problem. Consequently, they only want to fix the climate, as quickly and directly as possible. A lot of other people seem to use climate as an excuse to push for other goals.
- davidgl 7y agoI've always found the xkcd log scale picture very compelling when it comes to nuclear power - https://www.xkcd.com/1162/ https://www.xkcd.com/1162/
- ptah 7y agothat makes me doubt him as he obviously doesn't factor in the enormous difficulty of nuclear waste. nuclear energy is not green at all. EDIT: Also that was in 2004 and things have moved on massively since then
- johnr2 7y ago"he obviously doesn't factor in the enormous difficulty of nuclear waste" Scientist that he is, I very much doubt that he didn't factor it in. (You may disagree with his conclusions).
- acidburnNSA 7y agoNuclear engineer here. What specifically do you consider the enormous difficulty of nuclear waste to actually be? Technical issues? Political? Both? I see it as a well-understood technical problem with well-reasoned technical solutions. But the politics of "what so we do with the waste?" are basically self-sustaining now.
- ptah 7y agonuclear waste is tougher to deal with as opposed to green energy where there is no toxic byproducts
- Sahhaese 7y agoThat was published 2004, I'd be interested to hear if that's still the case given the 10x cost decrease in photovoltaic panels since then.
- vbuwivbiu 7y agoEveryone of his generation loves nuclear. It was the hottest thing back then. Makes me wonder what todays generations will be advocating which their children will have to deal with