Reply #65: Only the sleazy part of the fission PR industry fails to recognize an honorable man

[kristopher]

Unlike the scum merchants that put the narrative you are pushing together, Lovins' sells an expertise that is both beneficial and profitable. It PAYS to pursue energy efficiency. His work with WalMart leveraged significant energy efficiency improvements into the entire trucking sector. What has Joe Barton and Rod Adams et al done besides engage in the propagation of right-wingnuttery style misinformation and character assassination?
Here is why they do it:

...Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving: as Swedish Nobel physicist Hannes Alfvén said, “No acts of God can be permitted.” Fallible people have created its half-century history of a few calamities, a steady stream of worrying incidents, and many near-misses. America has been lucky so far. Had Three Mile Island’s con- tainment dome not been built double-strength because it was under an airport landing path, it may not have withstood the 1979 accident’s hydrogen explosion. In 2002, Ohio’s Davis-Besse reactor was luckily caught just before its massive pressure-vessel lid rusted through.

Regulators haven’t resolved these or other key safety issues, such as terrorist threats to reactors, lest they disrupt a powerful industry. U.S. regulation is not clearly better than Japanese regulation, nor more transparent: industry-friendly rules bar the American public from meaningful participation. Many presidents’ nuclear boosterism also discourages inquiry and dissent.

...Nuclear power is the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away; the only one whose ingredients can help make and hide nuclear bombs; the only climate solution that substitutes proliferation, accident, and high-level radioactive waste dangers. Indeed, nuclear plants are so slow and costly to build that they reduce and retard climate protection.

Here’s how. Each dollar spent on a new reactor buys about 2–10 times less carbon savings, 20–40 times slower, than spending that dollar on the cheaper, faster, safer solutions that make nuclear power unnecessary and uneconomic: efficient use of electricity, making heat and power together in factories or buildings (“cogeneration”), and renewable energy. The last two made 18% of the world’s 2009 electricity (while nuclear made 13%, reversing their 2000 shares)—and made over 90% of the 2007–08 increase in global electricity production.

http://rmi.org/rmi/Library/2011-02_LearningFromJapan


Posted with permission of the author at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/insidenova/2011/03/nuclear-lovins.html
The comments there are interesting also.

Physicist Amory Lovins consults on energy to business and government leaders worldwide. He’ s written 31 books and over 450 papers, and received the Blue Planet, Volvo, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, Zayed, and Mitchell Prizes, MacArthur and Ashoka Fellowships, 11 honorary doctorates, and the Heinz, Lindbergh, Right Livelihood, National Design, and World Technology Awards. He’s an honorary U.S. architect, a Swedish engineering academician, and a former Oxford don, and has taught at nine universities, most recently Stanford. His RMI team’s autumn 2011 book Reinventing Fire describes business-led pathways for a vibrant U.S. economy that by 2050 needs no oil, coal, or nuclear power to provide clean and resilient energy with superior economics.