Courtesy of Der Spiegel:

(James) Lovelock is a chemist, inventor, author and visionary environmental guru. Using a detector he invented himself, he was the first to provide evidence of ozone-consuming fluorochlorohydrocarbons (FCHC) in the atmosphere. More importantly, Lovelock is the inventor of the famous “Gaia hypothosis,” which holds that the planet (which he named after the Greek goddess of the Earth, Gaia), constantly controls all of its systems on land, in the water and in the air in such a way as to preserve life — almost as if the earth itself were a living organism.

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No world power, no scientist, no politician, no consumer forsaking his or her familiar comforts, and neither emissions trading nor wind energy nor biofuels will be capable of preventing the earth’s demise, he says. According to Lovelock, it will at best be possible to delay the catastrophe for a while — primarily through the massive expansion of nuclear energy.

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“Our situation,” Lovelock says, “is similar to that of a boat that suddenly loses engine power shortly before reaching Niagara Falls. What’s the point of trying to repair the engine?” To save what it can, Lovelock believes, the world must embark on a completely different path. Most important, it must abandon the notion of “green romanticism.”

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Lovelock has nothing but ridicule for environmentalists’ favorite issues, such as “sustainable development” and “renewable energy,” calling them “well-meaning nonsense.” He is convinced that wind and solar energy will never be even remotely capable of meeting worldwide energy needs. In China alone, for example, a new large coal power plant is put into operation every five days, imposing additional burdens on the atmosphere. The only solution, according to Lovelock, is the massive expansion of nuclear energy worldwide.

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“Fanatical Greens” who confuse nuclear power with nuclear bombs, says Lovelock, have discredited this source of energy. Do-gooders, he adds, are concerned about pesticide residues in bananas and the link between mobile phones and cancer, all the while accepting CO2 poisoning as a necessary evil. “They strain out the mosquitoes while blithely swallowing camels,” he says.

There is so little that I can add to this.

No matter how you slice it, Nuclear Energy is the cleanest and most plentiful of all of our options with currently available technology.  Depending on who’s estimates you use, there are suffiecient Uranium reserves for up to 100 years, and other sources of fissionable materials that could last for serveral hundred years.

And research on Fusion power generation is ongoing, and will, someday, provide us with the ultimate achievement of limitless inexpensive energy.