Ex-objector now extols benefits of N-energy

Thirty years ago, Patrick Moore would have probably preferred protesting outside of an EnergySolutions Customer Conference, which is taking place this week in Salt Lake City.

EnergySolutions, which now owns naming rights to the arena where the Utah Jazz play, runs the nation's largest disposal facility for low-level radioactive waste in Clive, Tooele County.

On Wednesday night, Moore, a Greenpeace founding member known for his confrontational approach to environmental issues, will be the annual conference's keynote speaker, bringing a consensus-building attitude that he has parlayed into a career as a consultant for the Vancouver-based Greenspirit.

"I was against nuclear energy for many years," he told the Deseret Morning News editorial board Tuesday.

Now, as co-chairman of the Clean and Safe Air Coalition, he's a walking, talking database of information he says shows nuclear energy is safe and secure and an environmentally sound source of power.

For example, Moore said that if the 103 nuclear power plants operating in this country today were replaced by coal-fired plants, it would be the emissions equivalent of putting 100 million cars on the road.

"Another thing most Americans don't know is that right now, at this time, 50 percent of all the nuclear energy being produced in the U.S., in other words, 10 percent of all the electricity being consumed by all of us today is recycled Soviet warheads," Moore said. "You can get a lot of fuel from a warhead. ... That's what's going on right now."

The reason Moore used to oppose nuclear energy was because of its relationship, in terms of resources used, to nuclear weapons.

But people shouldn't ban nuclear technology because of its "evil" uses, he said. That would be like banning oil, fertilizer and cars just because they are components in car bombs or akin to banning fire because it can burn down a house, according to Moore.

His confidence in nuclear energy is such that he testified in 2005 before a congressional subcommittee that nuclear energy "is the only non-greenhouse-gas-emitting power source that can effectively replace fossil fuels and satisfy global demand."

But Moore has had a hard sell for skeptics in key leadership roles in the United States and Canada who are flatly against the use of nuclear power or recycling the byproducts of producing nuclear energy to create more power.