LONDON - Countries building new nuclear power plants to tackle global warming should think again, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose time in office as Soviet leader included the world's worst nuclear accident, said on Thursday.
From Japan to the United States governments seeking an alternative to burning fossil fuels for power are reviewing the de facto ban on building new nuclear plants that followed the explosion at Chernobyl nuclear station in Ukraine in April 1986.
"Think again, think seven times again before you leap and start construction of new nuclear power plants," Gorbachev told a meeting of British lawmakers at London's Houses of Parliament, speaking through an interpreter.
"With my experience of Chernobyl I know what is involved. The explosion of one reactor required a superpower country to spend tens of billions of roubles. Still there was the longer pollution of the soil, the deaths of a number of people and consequences that will be far reaching," he added.
Nuclear advocates, who argue that nuclear power emits little of the major greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, reject comparisons with Chernobyl.
They say the Chernobyl design was flawed and the plant badly run, and that the accident could not be repeated with new designs, failsafe mechanisms and technology.
But Gorbachev said climate change could only be stopped through a combination of developing new energy sources like solar and wind and increasing efficiency of energy usage.
New predictions being studied by UN scientists for a report next year point to average global temperatures rising by three degrees Celsius this century, melting ice caps and causing floods, storms and famines putting millions of people at risk.
Environmentalists mostly agree with Gorbachev that the answer lies in non-nuclear and non-carbon alternatives to traditional power sources like nuclear, coal, gas and oil.
Story by Jeremy Lovell
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
