Climate Change or Nuclear Power - Which Risk do we Prefer?

Climate change and nuclear power provide two of the biggest technological risks of our times. Both involve widespread risks, long-term wastes and inter-generational equity, but in rather different ways. If it came to a choice, which is the worse set of risks to run? Serious doubts have been raised whether the implementation of renewable energies and energy saving are able in practice to deliver quickly enough the radical reductions of CO2 emissions that are needed to tackle climate change. Some countries may face a dilemma - to continue another generation of nuclear power or to accept that its CO2 emissions will rise when current nuclear stations finish their time? This paper compares the risks, and explores the ethical issues around which a society would have to weigh up such a choice, the role of the precautionary principle, and the place of expert and lay evaluations of risk (full text of contribution)