There are three parties when it comes to global warming. First, the hard right, which says it isn’t happening, and even if it is that we can do nothing about it. Then there are the far leftish Luddites who would smash all power generation systems, allowing only wind turbines, wave power etc. Finally there are the suave centrists who know perfectly well that only nuclear can save us. This book will become their bible.
Tim Gregory is a nuclear scientist who works at Sellafield. He has a serious problem defending his conviction that nuclear is the answer: radiophobia, the terror people feel about radioactivity. Superficially, this terror seems well-founded. There have been some major nuclear power plant disasters: Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in 1979; Chernobyl in the then Soviet Union in 1986; and Fukushima in Japan in 2011. Together they destroyed faith in nuclear as a safe generation system. The industry was stalled and still largely is.
This, argues Gregory, is madness. After Fukushima, only one death can be directly related to radiation – a man who died from lung cancer seven years later. The remaining 20,000 casualties were caused by the earthquake and the ensuing tsunami. Even the direct death count from the Chernobyl disaster only amounted to the ‘low to mid thirties’. ‘That’s about the same number of people who die at work in the United Kingdom every three months,’ writes Gregory.
In contrast, a city of one million people using coal power would suffer 22 deaths per week; using gas would result in two or three deaths per week. Globally, some 8.8
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