[NukeNet] Amory Lovins: Nuclear is Uneconomical, Saving 75% Of US Electricity

[Bill Smirnow]

   http://www.mothersalert.org/lovins.html
   Nuclear is Uneconomical
April 2007
by, Amory B. Lovins
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 Lovins
Rocky Mountain Institute



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