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
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