It is simply impossible to run the world on wind and solar energy. They are intermittent. They don't work when the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining, and we need backup power, base load power that's there 24/7. Unless we build nuclear plants, we've got to keep building coal plants and more gas plants, which are fossil fuels that release greenhouse gas and cause air pollution. The whole reason for the nuclear renaissance around the world is energy security and climate change and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions into the air. And Harvey and the rest of the people in my old organization of Greenpeace are stuck in the 1970s mentality. They have to come forward in time and think about what it is we can actually do.
We're not going run the country on tidal power, Harvey. It's just -- that's a pie in the sky, and so is a lot of the other stuff about running the country on wind and solar. They have their place in the scheme of things, but they cannot run the country.
So how are we going to produce the thousands of megawatts of power we need every day, especially when we're going to start charging our cars, our batteries in our plug-in hybrids, which doesn't make any sense to charge a plug-in hybrid on a coal-fired power plant or a gas plant. It makes a lot of sense to charge it on hydroelectric, nuclear and wind, when the wind is blowing. But, you know, you've got to have something for when it isn't, the two-thirds of the time when it isn't. Unfortunately, every time you build a wind farm, you have to build a gas plant to back it up. And that's going to make --
AG: Alright, let's get Harvey Wasserman's response to Patrick Moore.
HW: Well, Patrick, unfortunately, hasn't advanced much since he's signed up with the nuclear power industry. Nuclear power is a failed technology. We have $50 billion lined up in the Congress that needs to stop and not come out of the taxpayers' pocket, because, among other things, the reactors that these $50 billion would fund cannot come online in less than a decade. We need the answers to our energy solutions now. It's nuclear power that's really pie in the sky. It's a failed technology.
The first reactor went online in 1957 in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, and we have a half-century of experience with this. The nuclear industry still cannot get private insurance against a major catastrophe. You do not have to take out insurance on a wind farm against an accident or a terror attack that will destroy an entire city.
We need to build technologies that will come online, will bring us energy within a year or two, and that's wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, increased efficiency. The plan is there. Take a look at Carbon-Free, Nuclear-Free by Arjun Makhijani. There's plenty of other things, my own Solartopia book. We all have plans--
AG: Harvey, Harvey --
HW: -- that are very clear, but [inaudible] work.
AG: Steven Chu, President Obama's Energy Secretary, seems to agree with Patrick Moore. Among the things he said was -- this is Steven Chu -- "There is certainly a changing mood in the country, because nuclear is carbon-free, that we should look at it with new eyes."
HW: That's fine, but the fact is that we disagree with Steven Chu on that, and you also have to pay for these reactors. The Seabrook nuclear plant, Shoreham, Three Mile Island itself, Diablo Canyon in California, these reactors came in at more than 500 percent over budget. The average construction cost for a new nuclear plant in the last century, in the twentieth century, was twice as high as originally estimated. There are reactors now that are supposedly going to go under construction in Florida whose price -- estimated price has tripled, prior to even digging the first shovel at the construction site.
AG: Patrick Moore, what are you going to do with the nuclear waste?
PM: We're going to recycle it and use the 90 percent of the energy that's still in it. One of the great secrets that's been kept from the American people is that the used nuclear fuel, which does contain a small amount of waste that needs to be taken out of it before it can be recycled--the used nuclear fuel that is now at all the reactors around the country is one of the most important future energy resources, which is domestic, for the United States. There's twenty times as much energy in that used fuel as was produced in the original cycle when it went through the first time. But let me answer Harvey's point about tax --
AG: Wait. On that issue of --
HW: Amy, by the way --
AG: On that issue of waste, I want to ask -- get Harvey Wasserman's response to that.
