1 - When and why was EFN created? When did James Lovelock join it?

EFN - Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy was created in 1996. It has grown and now gathers more than 9000 members and supporters in 56 countries, including famous environmentalists such as Patrick Moore, founder of greenpeace in 1971, and my good friend James Lovelock, considered as the founder of environmental thinking since the 1960s. James Lovelock joined EFN in 2000 and wrote an introduction to my book "Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy" when the English edition was published the same year (the first French edition was initially published in 1995).

2 - What are the benefits of nuclear energy (for example, why not solar energy instead)?

Nuclear energy is the cleanest form of energy that is available in sufficient qquantities to permit the survival of our civilization without destroying our planet as we are doing by burning fossile fuels. Can you imagine that we are burning in just 50 years the oil that nature had taken 100 million years to fabricate ? If we wanted that to be sustainable, we need 2 million planets like the Earth! Humanity, and especially today's children, will be facing very hard times in the future, in few years from now when the climate gets hotter, making much of today's cultivated land sterile, and when, at the same moment, oil becomes scarce. We have to move to an environmentally clean, non-CO2 emitting source of energy that is available in sufficient quantities to grow our foods and ensure our survival. Solar is fine for producing hot water for domestic use (when the sun shines only). The fabrication of solar photovoltaic cells (for electricity production) is however both very expensive and very energy intensive (in some cases, the cells don't even give back the energy necessary to fabricate them in their whole lifetime) ! Solar power is too dilute : huge surfaces of land would need to be covered and the energy would be available only during daytime and on sunny days ! (when our modern society needs anergy day and night including on non-sunny days).

3 - What is the biggest challenge in your work?

Like Galileo, we are constantly facing old myths backed by powerful ideological groups that need to be debunked and set straight. Many think that just a few solar panels or windmills will solve the problem but never calculate what immensely vast surfaces of land would be required and the gigantic cost incurred for an energy that doesn't fit the need. Energy needs to be reliable, that is, produced upon demand. But the wind and sun are unpredictable. Many think that there is no solution for nuclear waste when in fact there are only very small amounts of it (1 gram of urnaium produces as much energy as 1 ton of oil, that's a factor of one million !). Nuclear waste does not interact with the biosphere because the basic rule for their management, contrary to chemical waste, is near-total confinement. They can be reprocessed in several ways, 97% can be recycled (unburnt uranium and plutonium) such as is done in France in the La Hague reprocessing plant, and they are self-degradable over time (by definition, a radioactive element disintegrates), which is not the case of the much greater amounts of highly toxic chemical wastes that we are constantly pouring in our rivers, on land and in the oceans. Many think that even small doses of radiation are dangerous when in fact radiation is natural and beneficial even at fairly high doses such as the high background radiation that can be found in special locations such as Guarapari in Brazil : radioactivity can be found everywhere in nature and such natural doses are useful and in fact necessary for our health. Only very high doses of artificial radiation can be harmful (radiation levels found inside a nuclear reactor is very high, therefore nuclear safety remains important, of course). Our work is to inform the public and the politicians in a complete and honest manner about energy and the environment, and especially about the many benefits of nuclear power for the environment. It needs very little fuel, it produces only minuscule amounts of waste which are well confined, therefore there is no impact on the ecosystems. The fear-mongerers and myths have to be set combatted, this requires a lot of time and patience!

4 - Besides nuclear energy, what other sustainable action do you fight for?

We recommend energy conservation, heat pumps, geothermal heating, solar hot water, the construction of ecological housing requiring almost none or no energy (passive houses). On a more personal level, I have been promoting for over 25 years natural and healthy living, natural foods and natural sleep patterns including a siesta each day, and living free from drugs and smoking, as you will see in my books http://www.comby.org/livres/livresen.htm

5 - Why are children important to save the world? How can they do it?

Children hold the future of our world in their hands. As my friend James Lovelock likes to say, humanity is the nervous system of Gaia. And today's children are therefore tomorrow's nervous system for our living planet. They will decide of its future. The best way for them to ensure that they take the correct decisions in a responsible manner is to go to school, educate themselves, learn about science (including environmental science and how a nuclear reactor works), so that tomorrow they will take the proper decisions to make possible the continuation of our civilization, while protecting our environment, procuring Gaia a long and peaceful life. In the field of energy, I see only one solution for that, in association with energy conservation and energy efficiency : it's called nuclear energy. Oil and gas will run out and are already badly harming Gaia by changeing our climate the chemical composition of our atmosphere, of the air we are breathing. Coal is even more polluting than oil and gas, and renewables can not hope to provide more than a minor proportion of our energy needs, in an intermittent manner. The renewable energies are unfortunately much too dilute and intermittent : solar energy is available only when the sun shines, and wind energy only when the wind blows, and large amounts of energy can not be stored in a convenient manner, so we need to rely on the only clean and reliable energy source we have available in large amounts, with vast urnaium resources for milleniums ahead (leaving time enough for our children's grand-grand children to find even better solutions in the future), the one which makes our sun and the stars shine and represents the main source of energy in the universe : nuclear power. We are quite lucky to have this solution at hand and we should seize this chance before it is too late.

Bruno Comby

President of EFN