Christians: Embrace uranium

The Religion Report - 13September2006 - Ian Hore-Lacy

Hmm, how did this happen? A book that criticises the "irresponsible romanticism" that is the basis of much of the Green (and Christian) environmentalist movements gets a fair hearing by Stephen Crittenden on his "Religion Report" show.

From the transcript above, the author comments:

The basic motivation of the book is to really challenge some of the Green Christian stuff which has been written over the last 15 years and suggest that a Christian approach should not only respect God's handiwork in creation, that is to focus on Green and aesthetic aspects, but also encompass a practical understanding of the earth's resources, which are no less his handiwork, and that's an important point. And furthermore of course, those resources are needed to give all the six billion inhabitants a standard of living comparable with ours. And Christians seem to just lose sight of that whole second aspect altogether, and that has increasingly worried me....
'
Stephen Crittenden: Your book's full of wonderful pithy sentences like the following: 'Nuclear energy is a fascinating area for Christian reflection.' How is it a fascinating area for Christian reflection?

Ian Hore-Lacy: Well because it's a resource which is timely. It's a resource which requires a particular technology which has been developed over the last 50 years, and which is now available when we actually need it quite badly to replace fossil fuels, both for the reasons we've mentioned in respect to oil, and similarly with gas, and also because of concerns about global warming. And so when these concerns are at a peak, here is the technology that is available. And what's more it isn't a very abundant resource, not simply in the amount of uranium you can quantify right now, and divide by the annual rate of usage right now, that gives you a fairly false or misleading sort of answer, but also because with another step in technology, which is fairly well proven, we can get about 50 or 60 times as much energy out of that resource. Now you can't do that with any fossil fuels.

Just like the miracle with the loaves and fishes, isn't it?

[Previous line not intended to sound sarcastic; more designed to annoy Christian greenies.]