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On 16/04/2009, Merle Lefkoff <me...@arspublica.org> wrote: > Peggy is right. I attach a short excerpt from Democracy Now. (Amory is > the guru.) > > AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, talk about nuclear > power. Why do you feel it’s not an option, given the oil crisis? > > AMORY LOVINS: Well, first of all, electricity and oil have essentially > nothing to do with each other, and anybody who thinks the contrary is > really ignorant about energy. Less than two percent of our electricity > is made from oil. Less than two percent of our oil makes electricity. > Those numbers are falling. And essentially, all the oil involved is > actually the heavy, gooey bottom of the barrel you can’t even make > mobility fuels out of anyway. > > What nuclear would do is displace coal, our most abundant domestic fuel. > And this sounds good for climate, but actually, expanding nuclear makes > climate change worse, for a very simple reason. Nuclear is incredibly > expensive. The costs have just stood up on end lately. Wall Street > Journal recently reported that they’re about two to four times the cost > that the industry was talking about just a year ago. And the result of > that is that if you buy more nuclear plants, you’re going to get about > two to ten times less climate solution per dollar, and you’ll get it > about twenty to forty times slower, than if you buy instead the cheaper, > faster stuff that is walloping nuclear and coal and gas, all kinds of > central plans, in the marketplace. And those competitors are efficient > use of electricity and what’s called micropower, which is both > renewables, except big hydro, and making electricity and heat together, > in fact, recent buildings, which takes about half of the money, fuel and > carbon of making them separately, as we normally do. > > So, nuclear cannot actually deliver the climate or the security benefits > claimed for it. It’s unrelated to oil. And it’s grossly uneconomic, > which means the nuclear revival that we often hear about is not actually > happening. It’s a very carefully fabricated illusion. And the reason it > isn’t happening is there are no buyers. That is, Wall Street is not > putting a penny of private capital into the industry, despite 100-plus > percent subsidies. > > > Nick Frost wrote: >> peggy miller wrote: >>> Below is link showing Obama's support for nuclear energy. I was sorry >>> to see it stated so clearly, because I remain believing that we can >>> proceed without nuclear energy (unless it is developing cold fusion, >>> which he does not state in his speech), using wind, solar, >>> geothermal, hydrogen. I continue to see no reason this is not >>> possible, and deeply fear, having sat through countless hearings on >>> Capitol Hill about the >> I agree with Peggy's comment about "the inevitable error of human >> management, and the inability to protect the toxics from leakage" >> >> I would add that while piracy is (IMHO) indefensible, the Somali >> piracy problem gathered much steam after the central government >> collapsed in 1991. The immediate results were predatory overfishing by >> foreign nations on the Somali coastline and the dumping of radioactive >> waste by European firms, which prompted fishermen to attempt to defend >> their waters and prevent the collapse of their fisheries. >> >> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article418665.ece >> >> http://abandonedheadlines.blogspot.com/2009/04/poor-coverage-of-somali-piracy.html >> >> >> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somali_piracy >> >> -Nick >> >> > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > -- Saul Caganoff Enterprise IT Architect LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/scaganoff ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
