Feared energy option may be hard to accept

James Loverock has always been an optimist

James Loverock has always been an optimist. Dr Loverock came to prominence some 30 years ago as the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis, a theory that postulates a symbiotic bond between life and the environment in which it finds itself.

Gaia postulated that an elaborate feedback mechanism exists between the two, so strong that the combined system can regulate and repair itself when necessary.

If it is knocked off balance by a catastrophic event - the impact of a giant meteorite, say, or a sudden change in global temperature - it can repair the damage; life, although not necessarily any individual species, will survive.

The theory was seen by some as a comforting answer to developing fears about greenhouse warming and its effect upon the global climate.

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Dr Loverock has recently been in the news again with an even more courageous theory. He has emerged as a strong advocate of nuclear power, and is also less sanguine, it would seem, about the future of humanity.

Highlighting the potentially catastrophic human consequences of the predicted rise in global temperature of several degrees, he says: "It could change the world into a hotter place, as different from our pleasant world of today as was the change from the glaciation".

He argues that if we want to prevent such an eventuality, there is insufficient time for a large-scale change to renewable energy.

Nuclear energy, on the other hand, "is now a well-tried and soundly engineered practice that is both safe and economic; given the will it could be applied quickly".

Dr Loverock sees the dangers of nuclear power as small compared to those of a major change in global climate. Even the Chernobyl disaster, he argues, cost fewer lives than the lethal fog of 1952 in London, when 5,000 people died from the effects of the polluted air.

"Disinformation about its dangers," he says, "sustains a climate of fearful ignorance, and has artificially inflated the difficulties of disposing of nuclear waste and the cost of nuclear power."

Dr Loverock claims our fear of nuclear energy is akin to our ancestors' superstitious fears of hell. "We used to look upon atomic energy as something desirable which would set us free. Its bad name is unjustified by scientific fact, and comes in part from its association in our minds with nuclear weapons, and the fear that ever accumulating stocks of nuclear explosives would lead to war.

"Some time in the coming century," he suggests, "the first greenhouse catastrophe may happen, and then we will look back and see what a vast disservice our politicians have done by neglecting the atom."

Now, there are some interesting thoughts.