Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: energy

  • Nuclear is Uneconomical

    Existing technologies for more efficient end-use can save three-fourths of U.S. electricity at an average cost of around 1 cent per kilowatt-hour–cheaper than running a coal or nuclear power plant, let alone building one. Scores of utilities have demonstrated and implemented at scale, rapid, large, predictable, and extremely cheap “negawatts” (saved electricity). California’s per-capita use of electricity has been flat for 30 years while per-capita real income rose 79 percent. Firms like DuPont, Dow, and IBM are saving billions of dollars by cutting energy intensity, sometimes as fast as 6-8 percent a year.

    My household saves 90 percent of electricity and 99 percent of space and water heating energy with a 10-month payback using 1983 technology. My team’s redesign of some $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors normally finds energy savings of 30-60 percent in retrofits (paying back in about 2-3 years) and 40-90 percent in new installations (typically with lower capital cost). A detailed road map for eliminating U.S. oil use by the 2040s, led by business for profit (“Winning the Oil Endgame”), shows how to save half of U.S. oil and gas at average costs one-fifth and one-eighth of current prices. Implementation is already underway. And each of the 60-80 known obstacles to implementing energy efficiency can be turned into a business opportunity.

    On the supply side, “micropower”–small-scale generation that emits little or no carbon dioxide–provided one-sixth of the world’s electricity and one-third of its new electricity in 2005, meeting from one-sixth to more than one-half of all electrical needs in 13 industrial countries. The smaller of micropower’s components, distributed renewable sources of electricity, was a $56 billion global equipment market in 2006, while the larger, combined-heat-and-power, was probably even larger. Micropower added four times the electricity and 8-11 times the capacity that nuclear power added globally in 2005, now produces more electricity than nuclear power does, and is financed by private risk capital. Micropower plus “negawatts,” which are probably about as big, now provide more than half of the world’s new electrical services.

    Nuclear power is unnecessary and uneconomic, so we needn’t debate its safety. As retirements of aging plants overwhelm construction, global capacity and output will decline (as they did slightly in 2006). Most independent analysts doubt the private capital market will finance any new nuclear plants. Even in the United States, where new subsidies would roughly repay the next six units’ entire capital cost, Standard & Poor’s said this wouldn’t materially improve the builders’ credit ratings. I expect this experiment will be like defibrillating a corpse: It’ll jump, but it won’t revive.

    Nuclear power’s market meltdown is good for global development: Saving electricity needs around 1,000 times less capital and repays it about 10 times faster than supplying more electricity. Shifting capital to saving electricity can potentially turn the power sector (now gobbling one-fourth of global development capital) into a net funder of other development needs. Further, an efficient, diverse, dispersed, and renewable energy system can make major supply failures, whether caused by accident or malice, impossible by design rather than (as now) inevitable by design.

    The nuclear phaseout will also speed climate protection, because buying negawatts and micropower instead will save 2-10 times more carbon per dollar, and will do so more quickly. And it can belatedly stem nuclear proliferation, too, by removing from commerce a vast flow of ingredients of do-it-yourself bomb kits in civilian disguise.

    This would make bomb ingredients harder to get, more conspicuous to try to get, and far costlier politically if caught trying to get, because the motive for wanting them would be unmasked as unambiguously military. Focusing intelligence resources on needles, not haystacks, would also improve the odds of timely warning. All this wouldn’t make proliferation impossible, but it would make things far more difficult for both recipients and suppliers.

    Thus, acknowledging and accepting the market collapse of nuclear power is an important step toward a fairer, richer, cooler, and safer world.

    Amory B. Lovins is the Cofounder, Chairman and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

  • Policies of Mass Destruction

    There is a force – a secret force hidden wisely from our view – that makes you and me, this newspaper, our planet, our sun and the Milky Way galaxy stretching trillions of miles around us. This force is omnipresent, coursing through every particle of your body. Indeed, this force IS you. It is the most powerful force we know, a force that makes the Universe we see, by the balance – the equilibrium – in its eternal action.

    57 years ago, this equilibrium was shattered when human beings split atoms within a primitive nuclear weapon. Through intervening decades, the phrase “weapon of mass destruction” has become all too well known in our lexicon.

    I became familiar with the controversy surrounding weapons of mass destruction in the late 1970s, when my father and mother organized Utahns United Against the Nuclear Arms race, an activist movement that confronted the United States military and ultimately helped to defeat the monstrous MX missile “shell game” basing plan. Before and since that era, other historic visionaries have battled the nuclear weapon insanity and its obscene policy fig leaf, mutually assured destruction.

    But life took me in other directions. into business, investment, and the technology breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade I pursued the American entrepreneurial dream as a CEO, driven by innovation and measured by profit. I was successful and content in this pursuit. That is, until I came to appreciate that there are other kinds of weapons of mass destruction than those launched from bunkers, subs and planes.

    Since 1998, I have come to realize that weapons of mass destruction come in many forms.

    A global economic program that rapes the natural world is a weapon of mass destruction far more lethal than any device in any arsenal of this world.

    An energy policy that invests in destructive rather than benign production is a weapon of mass destruction.

    Copyright and patent laws that artificially inflate the cost of sharing stories, songs, and science are weapons of mass destruction.

    Education systems that fail our children are weapons of mass destruction.

    Media that places ratings over truth is a weapon of mass destruction.

    A national security policy that shreds the sacred civil liberties within our democracy, and which sheds the international obligations between democracies, is a weapon of mass destruction.

    Indeed, a nation – our nation – whose high-school history teacher has a deeper grasp of world affairs than the man it entrusts with the future history of the world… is a weapon of mass destruction.

    To be sure, Saddam Hussein’s attempts to develop devices of mass destruction must be halted by the community of nations. But at the same time, we must ask ourselves: how can such devices best be eliminated from every nation’s arsenal? Shall it be by the development, testing and deployment of more such devices by a 21st century empire? Or rather by the global abolition of them, and a global program of verification, catalyzed by the greatest democracy the world has ever known?

    To me, one thing seems certain: we will not succeed in eliminating devices of mass destruction while we fail in eliminating policies of mass destruction. I find myself in rare agreement with George Bush in saying that we cannot allow the world’s worst leaders to use the world’s most dangerous weapons. I am hard pressed to identify a single major policy initiative of the Bush administration that is not a weapon of mass destruction.

    The elections of 2002 and 2004 are our opportunities for regime change. Let us use them wisely.