Full scale rage against nuclear

A scathing public attack on the World Energy Council (WEC) for its continuing support of fossil fuels and nuclear energy has been launched by firebrand German politician Hermann Scheer, president of Eurosolar, a renewable energy association. "The time has come to overcome structural conservative blindness and faint-hearted technological pessimism toward renewable energy," says Scheer. Nuclear energy is a "non-option" for a sustainable world energy supply. "The combined technological and economic optimisation of renewable energy will be easier to realise than for nuclear power, while avoiding its incalculable risks."

Scheer's attack follows the WEC's recent World Energy Conference in Sydney, Australia. While acknowledged by many to have been the most pro-renewables WEC conference to date, it still concluded that fossil fuel based energy will remain dominant and called for nuclear to increase its share in the world energy supply. Renewable energy, it said, will have a minor role in the future.

Noting $1 trillion has been spent on nuclear research in Europe while just $50 billion has been spent on renewable energy, Scheer refutes this: "Nuclear energy is still too expensive and too dangerous," he says. Moreover, renewable energy has "an energy supply potential for our planet that is 15,000 times as great as the annual consumption of nuclear and fossil energy."

Proposals for a revival of nuclear power are gaining support, he warns. "This pro-nuclear argument relies on twofold inhibition. Amid contrary facts, the economic advantages are praised. The risks are minimised or declared technically surmountable. At the same time, renewable energies are denounced as uneconomical, with their potential marginalised in order to underscore the indispensability of nuclear energy." Renewables, he says are "the only prospect" for clean and inexpensive power.