The People’s Front of Judea makes policy: agenda item, Nuclear Power

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in closed-door meetings where mainstream environmental lobbyists set down their organizations’ positions on the big issues of the day.

On the big issue of nuclear power in Ontario, how would the discussion go?

I wish it would go something like the one in the video clip below, substituting nuclear power for Romans:

I can see the Green Leader thundering “What has nuclear power done for us?” One of his inner circle points out that nuclear plants provide more than half the electricity on which this province utterly depends. “Oh, right. Well, aside from providing most of our electricity, what has nuclear power done for us?”

At which point the rest of the policy committee chimes in with these additional four points:

1. Nuclear-generated electricity lights schools, enabling young kids to study at night, thereby increasing the bang for the education buck.
2. Nuclear plants power hospitals, where doctors save people’s lives and nurse them back to health.
3. Without the steady supply of cheap bulk electricity that nuclear plants provide, the entire City of Toronto—and every other city in the province—would be literally uninhabitable.
4. And nuclear plants provide all these benefits without emitting a single gram of air pollution. If only wind and solar energy—which cannot operate on a modern electricity grid without massive backup from fossil fuels—could make that claim

By this time the Green Leader has had his fill of inconvenient truth, and adjourns the meeting.

But there’s more.

The province’s three nuclear plants have held their critical role for more than four decades. Here are some facts:

• These plants occupy such tiny plots of land that they could, collectively, fit quite comfortably into area occupied by the Amaranth-Melancthon wind farm near Shelburne.
• The wind farm has a capacity of 132 megawatts, and rarely produces anywhere close to 132 megawatts of actual electricity.
• The nuclear plants have a collective capacity of over 10,000 MW, and their electricity output is usually over 90 percent of that.

There is no contest between wind and nuclear, yet the self-appointed “environmental” lobby wants us to believe Ontario could run its schools, hospitals, and cities on wind. Would any of these lobbyists ride an elevator if they knew it was powered by wind? My guess is no. Why then should the whole province do it?

As I said above, I wish green discussions on nuclear power were as lively and that the Green Leader was as blessed as Reg with such subversive and independent-minded followers. But I have seen no evidence of critical thought among the official “greens.” They follow doctrine. They trot the Party Line. When followers break from the rest of the cult, they treat the apostates with low-level viciousness. Look at how Greenpeacers talk about Patrick Moore.

Still, I wonder, I really wonder, what gets said in environmentalist policy meetings. I wish that when the subject of nuclear power comes up, the discussion is similar to the one in the Monty Python clip above. But I doubt it.