Want an honest debate about nuclear energy?

Watch here as Stewart Brand and Mark Z. Jacobson have an environmentalist row over global energy options:

Over the last 40 years, Stewart Brand has emerged as one of the leading environmental voices and one who now strongly supports the use of nuclear and other clean energy sources as a method of combating greenhouse gases effect on global warming.

In 1960′s he founded, edited and wrote for the “Whole Earth Catalog” which was deeply influential in the US environmental movement. In 1966, he asked himself a basic question, which was how can we begin to see the earth as it is, as a finite resource?

“I herded my trembling thoughts together as the winds blew and time passed. And I figured a photograph—a color photograph—would help make that happen. There it would be for all to see, the earth complete, tiny, adrift, and no one would ever perceive things the same way. But how to accomplish this?”

He then began pushing an effort to press that the NASA help us produce that first image of the full, whole planet Earth seen from a distance, an image that up until then had never been taken.

Brand writes:

“It is no accident of history that the first Earth Day, in April 1970, came so soon after color photographs of the whole earth from space were made by homesick astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission to the moon in December 1968. Those riveting Earth photos reframed everything. For the first time humanity saw itself from outside. The visible features from space were living blue ocean, living green–brown continents, dazzling polar ice and a busy atmosphere, all set like a delicate jewel in vast immensities of hard–vacuum space. Humanity’s habitat looked tiny, fragile and rare. Suddenly humans had a planet to tend to. The photograph of the whole earth from space helped to generate a lot of behavior—the ecology movement, the sense of global politics, the rise of the global economy, and so on. I think all of those phenomena were, in some sense, given permission to occur by the photograph of the earth from space.”

Environmentalist Stewart Brand, when asked by Newsweek “Is Nuclear power green?”

Having been careful not to look into nuclear power for many years, when I began considering it I thought it was green primarily in the context of greenhouse gases and climate change. But frankly, now I’ve gotten to the point now that even if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, greenhouse gases, and climate change were not significant issues, I would still probably be pro-nuclear. Because coal is so awful….

The waste from coal means gigatons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. There is also the fly ash, slurry, and all the rest of the stuff. The sheer quantities get to be overwhelming. Eighty rail cars a day of coal, each one weighing a hundred tons goes into a 1-gigawatt coal-fired plant, and that multiplies to 19,000 tons of carbon dioxide, every day. Compare that to one year of a 1-gigawatt nuclear plant, which puts out 20 tons of very dense nuclear waste that goes into dry cask storage. You know exactly where it is and you monitor it, and it’s not doing anything bad. That’s a pretty strong contrast.