Institutional Acupuncture, indeed. Amory Lovins seven screens of unintelligible pap are not going to solve our energy problem. If all ways of saving and producing energy are allowed to compete fairly - without government subsidy - coal and oil win hands down every time. The idea that we can insulate or solar panel our way to zero emissions is wishful thinking at its worst. Just more Hopenhagen b.s. We complain about paving over the earth into a giant parking lot; are we going to pave it over with solar panels and windmills? Where do the desert tortoises go to live?

What we need is a sane nuclear policy which abandons solid fuel, pressurized, proliferative, environmental contaminating uranium/plutonium reactors in favor of thorium fuel cycle liquid fluoride reactors. This technology was proven in a pilot reactor project at Oak Ridge in the 1960's and abandoned because it wasn't useful for producing plutonium for weapons. It has the very real potential to deliver passively safe, non-proliferative, waste-manageable nuclear power at a cost comparable to coal. Thorium is nearly inexhaustible. There is enough thorium in the megatons of coal ash piled around the country to meet our needs for a century or more. Liquid fluoride thorium reactor can burn up most of our present nuclear waste and weapons grade plutonium for fuel. The waste produced by these reactors is orders of magnitude lower than present reactors and decays to background in three hundred years instead of three hundred thousand or more.

Safe, cheap, non-proliferative, inexhaustible power from dirt; or would you really rather go with Institutional Acupuncture and windmills?

Anyone who is serious about energy policy and who has taken even a few minutes to learn about the costs and benefits of various options knows that Amory Lovins' positions and arguments are biased by his financial relationships with oil and gas companies, and irreparably flawed by his repeated bashing of nuclear energy that is unsupported by the facts. For example, while Lovins claims nuclear energy is prohibitively expensive, the most recent Energy Information Administration's Annual Energy Outlook (http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/electricity_generation.html) shows that nuclear energy is BY FAR the lowest cost scalable low-carbon energy source.

As as for the proliferation risk presented by commercial reactor operation, there has never been a single example of nuclear weapons developed from commercial reactor technology. The reason? To do so would defy the laws of nature and fundamentals of engineering. I discussed this recently on Episode 77 of This Week in Nuclear (http://thisweekinnuclear.com/?p=856).

I am disappointed that a trusted news source like Foreign Policy would disgrace it's pages with such blatantly biased and misleading information from Lovins.

John Wheeler
Producer, This Week in Nuclear Podcast

Amory Lovins argues that nuclear energy is not a cost-effective energy source to reduce the growth of greenhouse gases. Ratepayers may see it otherwise. Nuclear energy costs ratepayers as little as $0.06/Kw/Hr and that is from an "old" plant like Vermont Yankee.

By comparison, fossil fuel sources cost rate payers in neighboring New England states upwards of $0.15/Kw/Hr or two-and-a-half times as much. Solar and wind power have real costs of as much as $0.25/Kw/Hr.

The nonproliferation arguement is hollow especially in the U.S. Further, the small amounts of plutonium in spent nuclear fuel are a lousy source for use in weapons. Nation states that want them will build entirely separate facilities to produce HEU for use in weapons. Iran is a case in point.

By comparison, the United Arab Emirates just inked a $20 billion deal with South Korea for new commercial nuclear reactors. At the same time that country agreed not to develop its own enrichment capabilities nor recycle its spent nuclear fuel. It is a model of how nuclear energy can be developed without proliferation risk.

http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2009/08/vermont-yankee-center-of-battle-of.html

http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2009/12/south-korea-wins-uae-204-billion.html

Dan Yurman, Publisher, 'Idaho Samizdat' a blog about nuclear energy
http://djysrv.blogspot.com

Amory Lovins keeps writing the same article over and over and getting it picked for publication by major sources that seem unable to question the assertions masquerading as facts. For example, Lovins claims to have been prescient about the future of nuclear power when he refers to his 1980s prediction of its demise. Even today, he claims that he only needs to change one word of his prediction.

Though it is true that the US did not start any new plants between about 1978 and 2008, here are the number of kilowatt-hours produced by nuclear power plants in the year 1980, when Lovins made his prediction, and 2008, the last year when a full year of data is available.

1980 - 251 billion kilowatt-hours
2008 - 806 billion kilowatt-hours - in other words, generation from nuclear plants in the US has grown by 320% since his prediction.

He also claimed in 1980 that nuclear electricity was too expensive. Here are cost per kilowatt-hour for electricity generation in the US in 2008 for the major sources power:

(in cents per kilowatt-hour. Source - Nuclear Energy Institute)
Nuclear - 1.87
Coal - 2.75
Gas - 8.09

There is not much petroleum left in the power market in the US, except in Hawaii, Long Island, and Puerto Rico, but its average production cost was:

Petroleum - 17.26

Lovins was right on one fact; US oil intensity (barrels per unit of GNP) did decline steadily during the period from 1977 to 1985. During that period, the electricity production from burning petroleum decline from 358 billion kilowatt-hours to just 100 billion kilowatt hours. That is a 258 billion kilowatt hours per year drop in oil consumption.

What Lovins hates to admit, however, is the fact that HALF of that drop was met by the 132 billion kilowatt-hour per year increase in nuclear generation (from 251 billion kilowatt-hours to 384 billion kilowatt-hours).

Oil use in electrical power dropped by more than 70%, but nuclear energy production increased by more than 50%. Overall electricity use increased by 16% during the 1977-1985 time period.

(Source Table 8.2b Electricity Net Generation:  Electric Power Sector, 1949-2008 Energy Information Agency)

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast

My last comment did not help people understand just how much less oil the US used in producing electrical power in 1985 compared to what it used in 1977. (That period is chosen in response to Lovins description of how the oil intensity of the US economy measured in barrels per real GDP dollar fell by 5.2% per year during the period from 1977-1985.)

As noted in my last comment, the US produced 358 billion kilowatt-hours by burning oil in electrical power plants in 1977 and dropped that to 100 billion kilowatt-hours in 1985, a reduction of 258 billion kilowatt-hours. However, those units do not mean much - they do not convert in people's mind to barrels of oil or barrels of oil per day.

One barrel of oil burned in a typical steam plant operating with an efficiency of about 33% (fairly common in the late 1970s and early 1980s) produces 558 kilowatt hours of electricity. It would have required at least 462 million barrels of oil - neglecting the large amount of oil that would be consumed during the extraction, refining and transportation required to get the oil TO the power plants - to produce that amount of electricity.

That is 1.2 million barrels of oil per day. For comparison, the entire US economy consumed about 16 million barrels of all petroleum products each day in 1981; reducing its use in electrical power by 1.2 million barrels per day contributed a substantial 7.5% drop in consumption at a time when the economy was growing.

I do not have a good source of GNP figures, but I would not be surprised to find out that replacing oil in power generation with nuclear energy accounted for the lion's share of the improvement in oil intensity that the professionally anti-nuclear Lovins touts.

Hmmm. Wonder if he knows that?

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast