From John Hind
Steve Plater is right to ridicule Tam Dalyell’s claim that “it is widely
recognised that nuclear is the greenest form of energy”
(14 July, p 52),
but only half right. Any rational assessment will reveal that nuclear is the form of
energy with the lowest environmental impact, but the rational approach is often
lacking, so it is wrong to claim that this conclusion is widely recognised.
Plater argues that wind power is greener, and goes on to demand an assessment
of how much fossil fuel is used to construct and support a nuclear power
station. If that’s the criterion, we should do the same for a gigawatt of
wind-power capacity.
Generating wind power on a gigawatt scale would be a mammoth manufacturing
and civil-engineering project. It would involve, for example, no fewer than a
million of the high-efficiency Croatian turbines described in the same issue (p
20). The amount of fossil fuel needed to manufacture, construct, maintain and
decommission these devices would, I estimate, dwarf that for an equivalent
nuclear facility.
It is a sad fact that as soon as renewable energy sources are scaled up to
meet a significant proportion of energy demand, they begin to have a large
environmental impact and attract opposition from greens.
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