(2019-08-25) Eno The Necessity Of Nuclear

Brian Eno: The Necessity of Nuclear. Davie Byrne: My friend and frequent collaborator, Brian Eno, read my piece about the encouraging rise in divestment from fossil fuels and took issue with my concerns regarding the safety of nuclear power... Brian reached out to his friend Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Catalogue, The Long Now Foundation) who has been an advocate for nuclear for a while now. I may still have concerns about nuclear and safety, but hear them out.

You might know the name George Monbiot. He’s our most famous and probably most clear-sighted environmentalist. He writes for the Guardian and I never miss his column. He was virulently anti-nuke for years—until Fukushima in fact. When that happened, he changed his mind. He said something like: Fukushima was the ultimate horror story in nuclear accidents—an ancient reactor built in a bad location, poorly maintained and a series of maintenance errors. It was the worst accident imaginable. And the result? Not a single fatality from the nuclear meltdown (it was the flooding that killed people) and many lessons learned

His position, and mine, was that the only non-fossil way we have, as things stand, of meeting our energy needs realistically is with nuclear. That doesn’t mean we stop developing renewables—quite the opposite: nuclear just gives us a little more breathing space in which to do that.

All this was anticipated and well-argued in Stewart Brand’s excellent Whole Earth Discipline.

there are now new designs being pursued that recycle used fuel to extract more energy from it—which also solves the other problem: storage of still-hot spent rods.

I sent your piece and my response to Stewart Brand, who replied: My support for nuclear grows. Mainly, of late, from two arguments:

• 1) People doing serious sums of what it will take AT SCALE to really turn back greenhouse gases enough to level off climate change are saying now that it simply can’t be done without nuclear, a whole lot of nuclear.
• 2) An argument I haven’t seen before is that no other clean energy source can scale up as quickly as nuclear—IF the reactors are standardized. France and Sweden showed the way on this.