Mark Lynas

I have to admit thatI hugely enjoyed this article about Mark Lynas.

Except, well, I don’t believe that any more. Just a month ago I had a Damascene conversion: the Green case against nuclear power is based largely on myth and dogma. My tipping point came when I discovered just how much nuclear power has changed since I first set my mind against it.

Actually, very little has changed about nuclear power since he first set his mind against it. For example:

And those dangers? They’re still there but we need to discuss them truthfully. Take Chernobyl. We all know it was a disaster: the Greenpeace website states a death toll of 60,000 already and predicts another 140,000 deaths in the future. But these statistics fly in the face of mainstream science: according to the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, 28 people died in the initial phase and several thousand more have suffered from nonfatal thyroid cancer because of the accident. The UN report concludes that “there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident” – so the real death toll from the world’s worst nuclear accident is tiny. On a deaths per gigawatt-year basis, nuclear is safer than coal and oil.

That was true a decade ago when I was scribbling about that UN committee's report on Usenet. It's also always been true that coal releases more radioactive materials into the environment that the nuclear process itself does.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, nuclear is just as low-carbon a power source as wind and solar:

As that has also always been true. Nuclear has lower CO2 emissions than solar in fact, and about the same as onshore wind.

All of this information has been generally available for at least a decade: I knew it a decade ago so I do have to ask the question of why someone actively working as an environmental journalist, as Lynas was, didn't also know it?

But then again, there's more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth....

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