It's not only the spruikers for the nuclear power industry who are saying so. In his book The Revenge of Gaia, noted environmentalist James Lovelock reiterates his support for nuclear power. Certainly, set against the backdrop of global climate disaster, the risks associated with nuclear technology seem to be the lesser of two evils. But nuclear power only looks greenhouse-friendly from a distance. If you take a closer look, it's far from a solution to the climate crisis.

The first problem is the widespread idea that most greenhouse gases come from electrical power. Unfortunately for all of us, that's not the case. In 1999 the International Energy Agency estimated the world emissions from electrical networks at less than 39 per cent of total emissions. Of course, there are regional differences to this. The coal-fired stations in Victoria, for example, reportedly account for 55 per cent of the state's total emissions. In contrast, a 2004 European Union report found that, of the yearly 4 million tonnes of greenhouse gases put out by its (then) 15 countries, only 21 per cent came from electricity generation. So even if all the non-nuclear stations in the EU countries were replaced by nuclear ones, and these new stations were constructed, fuelled and operated without any greenhouse gases ever being generated (an impossibility), EU countries would still be pouring just on 80 per cent of their present load (more than 3.2 million tonnes of greenhouse gases) into the atmosphere each year. Whichever figures we go by, it's evident that even total removal of the fossil fuel stations from the equation would still see a vast quantity of greenhouse gases pouring into the atmosphere every year. Substitution by nuclear power could achieve no more than set back its damage by a few years.

Even if we decided that this is better than nothing, we're still faced with the problem of fuelling all these new reactors. This brings us to the second problem with nuclear power: a lack of fuel. Going on the figures on the World Nuclear Association website, if the present global output of electricity were obtained entirely from nuclear reactors, and as efficiently as best practice allowed, the uranium in all the known rich-ore bodies in the world that they list would keep them going for just under nine years. Thereafter, the world would have no nuclear power stations operating and therefore no power stations at all.

Given that the construction and initial fuelling of a reactor requires significant energy input and associated greenhouse emissions, this hardly makes good environmental sense. One solution to this shortage might be to mine uranium from poorer sources such as the earth's crust, granite, sedimentary rock and even seawater. The problem here, though, is that even if it became economically feasible to mine such sources, the amount of energy expended in extracting the uranium, preparing it for use and building new reactors would far exceed the energy it eventually generated. In other words, nuclear power isn't neutral when it comes to greenhouse gases. On the contrary, greenhouse gases are emitted at every step along the way to generating nuclear power.

In dismissing solar power, Homer has to overlook the recent United Nations report saying that an 800-square-kilometre area of the Sahara could generate enough electricity for the whole world. He is, of course, still entitled to his opinion that solar is a pipedream. But so too is the popular notion that nuclear power is greenhouse-gas friendly. Alan Roberts is a physicist and former member of the (advisory) nuclear safety committee of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency. Christopher Scanlon is a researcher with RMIT University's Globalism Institute and a co-editor of Arena Magazine.