Self-proclaimed “sensible environmentalist” Patrick Moore opened the UW Energy Hub Conference Friday by advocating nuclear energy, calling it the most effective way of reducing carbon emissions and consumption of fossil fuels.
Although he was a founding member of Greenpeace, Moore left the organization, feeling his colleagues created policies based on sensation rather than science. He is now a co-chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, a pro-nuclear energy association.
“Nuclear energy is one of the most important, beneficial energy technologies for the future of this world, and we need to go down that road,” Moore said.
With a nuclear moratorium up for repeal in Wisconsin in January 2009, Moore said the state government needs to remove “the barrier to nuclear energy which has been erected here.”
Moore used France as an example of the potential success of a nuclear-energy industry.
“France produces 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear power. [It is] clean, cost-effective and safe,” Moore said.
He said wind and solar power are unrealistic long-term solutions, as they are expensive and unreliable.
“You cannot run hospitals … on technologies that disappear for four days at a time,” Moore said.
Moore downplayed the common perception that nuclear energy is dangerous, saying no harm has ever come to the public from a nuclear accident in the West and nuclear waste can now be safely recycled.
According to Moore, technology should not be banned simply because it could be used as a weapon. He said nuclear energy can be kept “safe and secure, and out of the wrong hands.”
Moore said he clashes with many environmentalists on issues besides nuclear energy. He said politicians are too idealistic in their clean-energy initiatives, as well as that there is little evidence that humans are causing global warming and that it does not “warrant alarmism.”
UW Energy Hub is a campus organization that connects students with an interest in energy issues. The conference, held at the Fluno Center all day Friday, attracted both students and representatives from energy companies.
UW graduate student David Donovan, an organizer of the conference, introduced Moore as “one of the most forward-thinking and enlightened individuals in the environmental movement.”
