Treehugger has unearthed a quote from venerable UK environmentalist James Lovelock. In his 2007 book, Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock makes the following suggestion…

[T]he natural world would welcome nuclear waste as the perfect guardian against greedy developers, and whatever slight harm it might represent was a small price to pay… One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife… The preference of wildlife for nuclear-waste sites suggests that the best sites for its disposal are the tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by hungry farmers and developers.

Before we start drilling holes in the Amazon basin and shovelling nuclear waste into them, it might be worth doing a little more research. In fact research into the effects of radiation on wildlife has already been conducted near Chernobyl and the results aren’t good. In fact, they flatly contradict Lovelock’s assertion of ‘the preference of wildlife for nuclear-waste sites’…

The idea that the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant has created a wildlife haven is not scientifically justified, a study says...

…and…

Two decades after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, radiation is still causing a reduction in the numbers of insects and spiders.

The researchers have also found that far from having a ‘preference' for nuclear-waste sites some species of birds ‘significantly avoided nest boxes in heavily contaminated areas’. Shouldn’t this make us wonder whether Lovelock is right in being so unequivocal? The world’s rainforests, need we be reminded, are home to our closest living relatives, the apes (as if they don’t have enough problems without nuclear waste), as well as a vast abundance of other animals, while being a source for many pharmaceutical ingredients.

It’s said that ‘2,000 tropical forest plants have been identified by scientists as having anti-cancer properties’ and ‘less than one percent of the tropical rainforest species have been analyzed for their medicinal value’. Dumping nuclear waste in the Amazon would risk destroying cures for cancer and other diseases or putting them off-limits for thousands of years.

Which all feeds into Lovelock’s doom-laden view of the future. ‘If you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan’ and ‘the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable,’ he says. Are the rest of us going to give in that easily?