The choice

This is a story about two ships.

One of them is a huge cargo ship being loaded in Japan, where guards with machine guns patrol its deck. It is preparing to sail away with a deadly cargo of 225 kilograms of plutonium. The ship's owners live in fear that as little as five kilograms might be stolen to create a nuclear nightmare. Environmentalists live in fear that a fire or collision or storm could breach the hull and contaminate a living ocean for thousands of years. In nearly every port in every country the ship passes through, local residents live in fear for their seas and their livelihoods. There will be protest all along the route, which the ship will ignore, a gun turret menacing from its decks.

The other ship is a sailboat, with bright sails and bearing a peace dove on its bow. It's the Greenpeace flagship, Rainbow Warrior. Half a world away off the coast of Denmark, it is sailing through a sunlit ocean dotted with wind turbines like the ones all over Europe that are quietly generating more than 4,700 megawatts of energy. There's not a gun in site. There are no worries about a deadly accident spilling nuclear waste into the sea, no fear of terrorists hijacking the raw material for nuclear bombs.

Which of these represents our world's energy future?

The Nuclear waste ship is being loaded with plutonium waste as part of a vast expansion of the nuclear industry's plans for nuclear fuel reprocessing.

Reprocessing involves separating plutonium from old fuel. Japanese electrical utilities have signed contracts for reprocessing their spent nuclear reactor fuel in Europe. But the same plutonium that can fuel a nuclear reactor can also make a nuclear bomb. The world already has too much plutonium, and in the post-September 11th world, shipping it across the globe is... well, let's just call it foolhardy. The projected total stocks of plutonium will amount to over 145,000 kilograms by 2020 if the currently proposed reprocessing contracts are not stopped.

Tom Clements, one of our anti-nuclear campaigners who is opposing the shipment, has said that "if industry and government plans proceed, the narrow straits between Korea and Japan are about to become a plutonium freeway."

What's the alternative?

Offshore wind could supply over a third of the electricity needs for countries bordering the North Sea within a generation. Perhaps you'd like to read that sentence again -- it's one of those facts that a few of us have been shouting for decades now, and which the nuclear industry doesn't want you to hear.

In the spirit of continuing to shout this kind of fact, our flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, began Greenpeace's Choose Positive Energy tour at Horns Rev, the world's largest offshore wind park that is being built in Danish waters.

According to Greenpeace UK Executive Director Stephen Tinsdale, "there needs to be a massive expansion of renewable energy supplies in the northern industrialised countries to make renewable energy cost effective enough to take off in southern countries. The North Sea is set to be the cradle of the global renewables revolution."

Wind energy is competitive with coal and gas power generation and clearly beats the more expensive nuclear power. This is one of the main conclusions of 'Wind Force 12', a recent report produced by Greenpeace and the European Wind Energy Association. The UK government's energy review projected that wind energy will be the cheapest energy source by 2020.

More than 4,700MW of wind power was installed onshore in the Europan Union last year - producing as much electricity as two large nuclear reactors. By the end of this year, another 6,000MW will be added and a further growth of 30-40 percent per year is expected.

The world has a chance to choose alternative energy when the Earth Summit commences in Johannesburg in less than sixty days. There, Greenpeace is calling for the world's governments to take the following challenge: get clean energy into the hands of two billion people who are without electricity within ten years. With existing and imminent advances in solar and wind technologies, that goal is entirely achievable.

So why do we choose to send deadly plutonium half way around the world when one of the answers to our energy needs is blowing in the wind?