Last month I asked Clean Break readers whether, if forced to choose, they would prefer nuclear power or electricity produced from clean-coal plants. Of 126 people who voted, 67 (53 per cent) chose clean coal, while 59 (47 per cent) chose nuclear.

I must say the voting was closer than I thought. Clean coal took an early lead and about half way through the voting this largely experimental technology was winning by a 2-to-1 margin. This told me that the informed readers who visit this blog have a difficult time swallowing the safety and waste-disposal issues associated with nuclear, and are more willing to give new clean-coal technologies a chance to prove themselves.

On April 21, however, after I blogged about the book The Weather Makers by Australian scientist Tim Flannery, nuclear got a major boost in the voting. I can’t be sure why, but I suspect it’s partly because I cited the fact that Flannery, who was in Toronto promoting his book, is an anti-nuke guy who is now giving the technology a second thought. Flannery, to recap, said clean coal comes with enormous cost and uncertainty even if it does work as claimed, and that it wouldn’t have any meaningful impact until mid-century. The bottom line, he said, is that nuclear is the lesser of evils compared to coal and that nuclear safety and waste issues are manageable.

My own take on clean coal: I believe we can clean coal up considerably, but I’m not convinced that sequestration of CO2 is going to work on any large scale. And without the costly and highly risky sequestration component of clean coal, we’ve got little chance of putting a dent in global warming.

Perhaps Flannery’s comments played a role in changing the minds of Clean Break readers? I’m sure the natural gas and renewables folks out there hated being confined to those two choices… sorry about that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Main Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.