Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Regretting his stand against nuclear power



Here's an interesting op-ed from Robert Thorson about the current state of the environment, energy, and climate, with respect to nuclear power.

Climate Change and the Nuclear Power Riddle

Here are his concluding three paragraphs:
"This is the scary part. That previous interglacial sea level at the same temperature was 16 to 27 feet higher than the present shorelines. This is based on a variety of undeniable markers for interglacial shorelines such as elevated beaches and wave-cut cliffs. They cannot be explained away. This is where sea levels are heading.

It's not a matter of if, but when. We've already taken Earth's three largest ice cubes (Greenland, East Antarctic, West Antarctic) out of the freezer. They're melting at rates faster than the politicized international predictions. We can't put them back into the freezer because the excess CO2 in the atmosphere will last for centuries, and because ice-sheet disintegration is an irreversible process. The only thing we can do is wait, watch, retreat and adapt.

I'm still on the fence with respect to nuclear power. But I wish I'd been more careful what I wished for. "Go Fishing, Not Fission" has impoverished the seas and is flooding our shores."

I think I'd like to tell him to get off the fence, tell our reps and Sens and PTB to invest in all forms of clean (non-CO2 releasing) energy. ASAP.

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