Stewart Brand Looking for "Green Nuclear Engineers"

In today's edition of the New York Times, John Tierney talks to Stewart Brand:

Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering.

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He’s also looking for green nuclear engineers, and says he feels guilty that he and his fellow environmentalists created so much fear of nuclear power. Alternative energy and conservation are fine steps to reduce carbon emissions, he says, but now nuclear power is a proven technology working on a scale to make a serious difference.

“There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective,” he says. “Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don’t know where it is and you don’t know what it’s doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody’s atmosphere.”

Brand started talking this way almost two years ago when he published, Environmental Heresies in the pages of MIT Technology Review.

For those of you not familiar with Brand and his change of heart regarding nuclear energy, you might want to watch this speech he delivered at the 2006 Nuclear Energy Assembly:



For the rest of our Stewart Brand file, click here.