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Independent: Nuclear power? Yes please…

Britain must embrace nuclear power if it is to meet its commitments on climate change, four of the country's leading environmentalists—who spent much of their lives opposing atomic energy—warn today.

The one-time opponents of nuclear power, who include the former head of Greenpeace, have told The Independent that they have now changed their minds over atomic energy because of the urgent need to curb emissions of carbon dioxide.

They all take the view that the building of nuclear power stations is now imperative and that to delay the process with time-consuming public inquiries and legal challenges would seriously undermine Britain's promise to cut its carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050…

Mr [Stephen] Tindale, who ran Greenpeace for five years until he resigned in 2005, has taken a vehemently anti-nuclear stance through out his career as an environmentalist. "My position was necessarily that nuclear power was wrong, partly for the pollution and nuclear waste reasons but primarily because of the risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons," Mr Tindale said…

"My change of mind wasn't sudden, but gradual over the past four years. But the key moment when I thought that we needed to be extremely serious was when it was reported that the permafrost in Siberia was melting massively, giving up methane, which is a very serious problem for the world," he said.

"It was kind of like a religious conversion. Being anti-nuclear was an essential part of being an environmentalist for a long time but now that I'm talking to a number of environmentalists about this, it's actually quite widespread this view that nuclear power is not ideal but it's better than climate change," he added.