Profile of a Company That Funds the Famous Anti-nuke Amory Lovins: Suncor.

[NNadir]

I think it would be fun, now that BP - that would be um, "Beyond Petroleum," BP, the owners of the great "BP solar" and of course the dangerous oil rig that is destroying the Gulf of Mexico - one of the companies that funds Amory Lovins is, um, in the news.

A complete list of filthy dangerous fossil fuel corporations that pay Lovins to greenwash them is found on his website.

http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Amory+B.+Lovins">Famous Anti-nuke Amory Lovins describes his revenue sources:

Mr. Lovins’s other clients have included Accenture, Allstate, AMD, Anglo American, Anheuser-Busch, Bank of America, Baxter, Borg-Warner, BP, HP Bulmer, Carrier, Chevron, Ciba-Geigy, CLSA, ConocoPhillips, Corning, Dow, Equitable, GM, HP, Invensys, Lockheed Martin, Mitsubishi, Monsanto, Motorola, Norsk Hydro, Petrobras, Prudential, Rio Tinto, Royal Dutch/Shell, Shearson Lehman Amex, STMicroelectronics, Sun Oil, Suncor, Texas Instruments, UBS, Unilever, Westinghouse, Xerox, major developers, and over 100 energy utilities. His public-sector clients have included the OECD, the UN, and RFF; the Australian, Canadian, Dutch, German, and Italian governments; 13 states; Congress, and the U.S. Energy and Defense Departments.

In a series that I'm starting now, I'd like to examine some of the websites of the companies that fund Lovins, to see if they're all as swell as BP, which needs no introduction.

According to Lovins bullshit and very stupid paper written in 1976 in Foreign Affairs, he favored, um, wild cat coal, distributed coal, like the kind that is now killing lots of people in China and India for the United States. Quoth he:

It is above all the sophisticated use of coal, chiefly at modest scale, that needs development. Technical measures to permit the highly efficient use of this widely available fuel would be the most valuable transitional technologies. Neglected for so many years, coal technology is now experiencing a virtual revolution. We are developing supercritical gas extraction, flash hydrogenation, flash pyrolysis, panel-bed filters and similar ways to use coal cleanly at essentially any scale and to cream off valuable liquids and gases as premium fuels before burning the rest. These methods largely avoid the costs, complexity, inflexibility, technical risks, long lead times, large scale, and tar formation of the traditional processes that now dominate our research.

Lovins, "Wildcat Coal Boy" Amory, Foreign Affairs, "The Road Not Taken," Foreign Affairs, 1976, citation from pages 84-85.

Now mind you, Lovins, like every anti-nuke knows no science whatsoever, least of all chemistry. He was completely ignorant of climate change, because despite of his claim to be a physicist (which is pure nonsense) he apparently was unaware of the work of the great 19th century physical chemist Arrhenius's work on carbon dioxide.

And where was the ash and heavy metals from this small distributed coal industry Amory advocated going to go, heavy metals and all. Who cares? Dump it in a nearby river, just like they do in China and India today. Carcinogenic coal tar benzene and anthracene from this swell operation. Spread it on the fields.

So, Amory, coal was a transitional fuel in your mind in 1976?

Transitional my ass. (We'll get to Rio Tinto a little later.)

So, um, what about Suncor? Solar company, right?

Um, no.

Here is the Suncor website: http://www.suncor.com/default.aspx

You see those logos on the bottom?

Suncor is a joint venture of Sunoco and Petrocanada and they are in the oil sands business, which involves the ugly process of strip mining Canadian sands, using water and steam heated by coal and other dangerous fossil fuels to extract oil from them - and tremendous greenhouse gas costs - dumping the ruined sand on the land, and um destroying the water used.

Here is a company statement on the website about their business operations:

The new Suncor, like the old Suncor, will continue to be strategically focused on responsibly developing and growing our core business — the oil sands. We hold the largest single position in the industry and a strong platform for growth.

That core business is supported by our other operations.

Our Natural Gas business provides a price hedge against the cost of energy we use in our oil sands business. And as we continue to refocus our assets, our target is to position ourselves so we can look at long-term growth as one of the lowest-cost natural gas producers in North America.

International and Offshore — which is also being refocused on core assets — provides strong and stable cash flow throughout the commodity price cycle. As you may know, we just recently started commercial production from our Ebla project in Syria. The project — which has an initial planned production of about 80 million cubic feet of natural gas per day — was completed within budget and ahead of schedule. I want to congratulate the team there on their great work.

Back here in North America, our Refining and Marketing business connects our core oil sands business to downstream markets and customers, extending our value chain and providing a degree of protection against crude oil price swings.

And last — but certainly not least — our renewable energy business helps reduce our corporate carbon footprint, while we build a position in this growing market. Looking across all of our operations, we have more attractive growth options than we can immediately execute. And that’s a great position to be in.

http://www.suncor.com/en/newsroom/2470.aspx?id=3394

Note the stupid and fraudulent "fig leaf" that all Lovins funding dangerous fossil fuel companies use to deflect attention from their real business: So called "renewable energy."

So called "renewable energy" is nothing more than a dangerous fossil fuel red herring. It doesn't work; it can't work (even with decades of mindless cheering) and is simply employed as a red herring.

Yeah, BP Solar really saved the day, didn't it? "Beyond Petroleum." Right. That's, um, solar petroleum that coats the Gulf of Mexico tonight, and that makes it, um, "green" and "sustainable."

Heckuva job Amory. Heckuva job.

Amory Lovins and all of his mindless worshippers are all invested in maintaining the dangerous fossil fuel status quo. They have no plan and no interest in containing dangerous fossil fuel waste, in stopping dangerous fossil fuel wars, in preventing dangerous fossil fuel accidents or cleaning up the effects on the land of dangerous fossil fuel mining.

It's not that they couldn't care less about these things, although in fact, they couldn't care less. It's that they promote the dangerous fossil fuel companies and are openly owned by them.

Have a nice evening.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Anglo American ...

Anglo American's metallurgical coal business has six operations in Australia and is the fourth biggest producer of coal.

http://www.angloamerican.co.uk/aa/business/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo_American_plc

[NNadir]

3. I'll be sure to put Anglo American on the list in future elements of this series. Thanx.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[kristopher]

4. Why do the disciples of the the Church of Uranium try to discredit Amory Lovins?

Lovins has successfully dedicated his life to improving our environmental footprint when it comes to energy usage. As can be seen in the OP he works with corporations seeking to find ways to energy efficiency in their operations. Jared Diamond also believes that solutions to our current problems are best pursued by finding the incentives within the market that move corporations to act in ways that are positive environmentally rather than negative.

Lovins became prominent in the 70s with a thesis that looked at the cultural and social impacts of centralized thermal generation such as coal and nuclear power. His work (link below) is blamed by members of those who worship at the Throne of Uranus for the lack of support ended the first Bandwagon market for building of nuclear power plants in the 70s.



Now that the Church of Uranium is trying exploit climate change to achieve a Revival they are again focused on Lovins.
This is the link to download his 77 Foreign Policy paper: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E77-01_EnergyStrategyRoadNotTaken

And these are for two of his more recent writing:

http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E08-01_NuclearIllusion


http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly


This a a selection from another of his open access writings on nuclear power. It is followed by an analysis by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson of the available and workable solutions to climate change, energy security and air pollution mortality. It shows that independent of Lovins' perspective on distributed generation vs central thermal generation, nuclear power is still a third rate choice for meeting our AGW, energy security and air pollution mortality needs.

Public discussions of nuclear power, and a surprising number of articles in peer-reviewed
journals, are increasingly based on four notions unfounded in fact or logic: that

1. variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little
or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
2. those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more
than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
3. all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
4. nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to
protect the climate.

For specificity, this review of these four notions focuses on the nuclear chapter of Stewart
Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, which encapsulates similar views widely expressed
and cross-cited by organizations and individuals advocating expansion of nuclear power. It’s
therefore timely to subject them to closer scrutiny than they have received in most public media.

This review relies chiefly on five papers, which I gave Brand over the past few years but on
which he has been unwilling to engage in substantive discussion. They document6 why
expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed
renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever
more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection. That’s
because—the empirical cost and installation data show—new nuclear power is so costly and
slow that, based on empirical U.S. market data, it will save about 2–20 times less carbon per
dollar, and about 20–40 times less carbon per year, than investing instead in the market
winners—efficient use of electricity and what The Economist calls “micropower,”...


The “baseload” myth

Brand rejects the most important and successful renewable sources of electricity for one key
reason stated on p. 80 and p. 101. On p. 80, he quotes novelist and author Gwyneth Cravens’s
definition of “baseload” power as “the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock,
rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of
customers.”21 (Thus it describes a pattern of aggregated customer demand.) Two sentences
later, he asserts: “So far comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and
nuclear.” Two paragraphs later, he explains this dramatic leap from a description of demand to a
restriction of supply: “Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they
are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some sort of massive
energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain
supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants.”

That widely heard claim is fallacious. The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable
power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistic-
al attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any
desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid
couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example,
in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2%
without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%). Worldwide through 2008,
nuclear units were unexpectedly unable to produce 6.4% of their energy output.26 This inherent
intermittency of nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants requires many different plants to back
each other up through the grid. This has been utility operators’ strategy for reliable supply
throughout the industry’s history. Every utility operator knows that power plants provide energy
to the grid, which serves load. The simplistic mental model of one plant serving one load is valid
only on a very small desert island. The standard remedy for failed plants is other interconnected
plants that are working—not “some sort of massive energy storage devised.”

Modern solar and wind power are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear plants; their
technical failure rates are typically around 1–2%. However, they are also variable resources
because their output depends on local weather, forecastable days in advance with fair accuracy
and an hour ahead with impressive precision. But their inherent variability can be managed by
proper resource choice, siting, and operation. Weather affects different renewable resources
differently; for example, storms are good for small hydro and often for windpower, while flat
calm weather is bad for them but good for solar power. Weather is also different in different
places: across a few hundred miles, windpower is scarcely correlated, so weather risks can be
diversified. A Stanford study found that properly interconnecting at least ten windfarms can
enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. Similarly, within
each of the three power pools from Texas to the Canadian border, combining uncorrelated
windfarm sites can reduce required wind capacity by more than half for the same firm output,
thereby yielding fewer needed turbines, far fewer zero-output hours, and easier integration.

A broader assessment of reliability tends not to favor nuclear power. Of all 132 U.S. nuclear
plants built—just over half of the 253 originally ordered—21% were permanently and
prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems. Another 27% have completely failed for a
year or more at least once. The surviving U.S. nuclear plants have lately averaged ~90% of their
full-load full-time potential—a major improvement31 for which the industry deserves much
credit—but they are still not fully dependable. Even reliably-running nuclear plants must shut
down, on average, for ~39 days every ~17 months for refueling and maintenance. Unexpected
failures occur too, shutting down upwards of a billion watts in milliseconds, often for weeks to
months. Solar cells and windpower don’t fail so ungracefully.

Power plants can fail for reasons other than mechanical breakdown, and those reasons can affect
many plants at once. As France and Japan have learned to their cost, heavily nuclear-dependent
regions are particularly at risk because drought, earthquake, a serious safety problem, or a
terrorist incident could close many plants simultaneously. And nuclear power plants have a
unique further disadvantage: for neutron-physics reasons, they can’t quickly restart after an
emergency shutdown, such as occurs automatically in a grid power failure...

From Amory Lovins
Four Nuclear Myths: A Commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on Similar Writings

Journal or Magazine Article, 2009

Available for download: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-09_FourNuclearMyths

Some nuclear-power advocates claim that wind and solar power can’t provide much if any reliable power because they’re not “baseload,” that they use too much land, that all energy options including new nuclear build are needed to combat climate change, and that nuclear power’s economics don’t matter because climate change will force governments to dictate energy choices and pay for whatever is necessary. None of these claims can withstand analytic scrutiny.

Abstract here: http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Full article for download here: http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/revsolglobwarmairpol.htm


Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c

Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

Abstract
This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

[NNadir]

5. I have a differing view of Lovins goals. I think he's a dangerous fossil fuel greenwasher.

I know what you think, but the purpose of this thread is to indicate who pays him. Note one piece of data on this point is Lovins very own website, which says who pays him.

There is no "church of uranium." There are millions of scientific papers on this naturally occurring element.

Any confusion about what is science and what is dogma is not mine.

The chanting that goes on here by anti-nukes, which apparently involves repeating the same paper over and over and over and over sort of like they way people repeat the Hail Mary or Lord's Prayer, has nothing to do with the fact that Lovins is paid to greenwash dangerous fossil fuels or that his website clearly states as much.

Suncor pays him. They are a oil sands company. Toss all the red herrings you want and that will still be true.

Have a nice denialist Suncor greenwashing evening.

[jpak]

6. Amory Lovins never invented a molten salt breeder reactor while addicted to Ambien

but apparently others have...

:rofl:

[NNadir]

8. Amory Lovins never invented anything. He didn't even invent the hydrogen HYPErcar that will be in

showrooms by 2005.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/10/1016_TVhypercar.html

All of the patents listing a "Lovins" as an inventor - 3 for wheelchairs by Lovins and one for the isolation of antibodies and one for making decorative tiles - were invented by a person not named "Amory."

http://www.uspto.gov/

He did however Ponzi scheme a fair number of investors however.

Give the fool credit. He knows how to fleece dummies. I don't know if Lovins can patent running a Ponzi scheme - the patent examiners may cite Madoff as having prior art - but nevertheless he is skilled in the art.

By contrast, the term "molten salt" on USPTO covers 4,795 issued patents. "Molten salt" and "nuclear" covers more than 400 patents.

Have a nice oil sands company promoting evening.

[kristopher]

7. No you don't. You HATE him for eviscerating The Church of Uranium

ROFLMAO, "There is no "church of uranium" says the scab kneed devotee...

Lovins has successfully dedicated his life to improving our environmental footprint when it comes to energy usage. As can be seen in the OP he works with corporations seeking to find ways to energy efficiency in their operations. Jared Diamond also believes that solutions to our current problems are best pursued by finding the incentives within the market that move corporations to act in ways that are positive environmentally rather than negative.

Lovins became prominent in the 70s with a thesis that looked at the cultural and social impacts of centralized thermal generation such as coal and nuclear power. His work (link below) is blamed by members of those who worship at the Throne of Uranus for the lack of support ended the first Bandwagon market for building of nuclear power plants in the 70s.



Now that the Church of Uranium is trying exploit climate change to achieve a Revival they are again focused on Lovins.
This is the link to download his 77 Foreign Policy paper: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E77-01_EnergyStrategyRoadNotTaken

And these are for two of his more recent writing:

http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E08-01_NuclearIllusion


http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly


This a a selection from another of his open access writings on nuclear power. It is followed by an analysis by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson of the available and workable solutions to climate change, energy security and air pollution mortality. It shows that independent of Lovins' perspective on distributed generation vs central thermal generation, nuclear power is still a third rate choice for meeting our AGW, energy security and air pollution mortality needs.

Public discussions of nuclear power, and a surprising number of articles in peer-reviewed
journals, are increasingly based on four notions unfounded in fact or logic: that

1. variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little
or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
2. those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more
than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
3. all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
4. nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to
protect the climate.

For specificity, this review of these four notions focuses on the nuclear chapter of Stewart
Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, which encapsulates similar views widely expressed
and cross-cited by organizations and individuals advocating expansion of nuclear power. It’s
therefore timely to subject them to closer scrutiny than they have received in most public media.

This review relies chiefly on five papers, which I gave Brand over the past few years but on
which he has been unwilling to engage in substantive discussion. They document6 why
expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed
renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever
more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection. That’s
because—the empirical cost and installation data show—new nuclear power is so costly and
slow that, based on empirical U.S. market data, it will save about 2–20 times less carbon per
dollar, and about 20–40 times less carbon per year, than investing instead in the market
winners—efficient use of electricity and what The Economist calls “micropower,”...


The “baseload” myth

Brand rejects the most important and successful renewable sources of electricity for one key
reason stated on p. 80 and p. 101. On p. 80, he quotes novelist and author Gwyneth Cravens’s
definition of “baseload” power as “the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock,
rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of
customers.”21 (Thus it describes a pattern of aggregated customer demand.) Two sentences
later, he asserts: “So far comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and
nuclear.” Two paragraphs later, he explains this dramatic leap from a description of demand to a
restriction of supply: “Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they
are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some sort of massive
energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain
supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants.”

That widely heard claim is fallacious. The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable
power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistic-
al attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any
desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid
couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example,
in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2%
without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%). Worldwide through 2008,
nuclear units were unexpectedly unable to produce 6.4% of their energy output.26 This inherent
intermittency of nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants requires many different plants to back
each other up through the grid. This has been utility operators’ strategy for reliable supply
throughout the industry’s history. Every utility operator knows that power plants provide energy
to the grid, which serves load. The simplistic mental model of one plant serving one load is valid
only on a very small desert island. The standard remedy for failed plants is other interconnected
plants that are working—not “some sort of massive energy storage devised.”

Modern solar and wind power are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear plants; their
technical failure rates are typically around 1–2%. However, they are also variable resources
because their output depends on local weather, forecastable days in advance with fair accuracy
and an hour ahead with impressive precision. But their inherent variability can be managed by
proper resource choice, siting, and operation. Weather affects different renewable resources
differently; for example, storms are good for small hydro and often for windpower, while flat
calm weather is bad for them but good for solar power. Weather is also different in different
places: across a few hundred miles, windpower is scarcely correlated, so weather risks can be
diversified. A Stanford study found that properly interconnecting at least ten windfarms can
enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. Similarly, within
each of the three power pools from Texas to the Canadian border, combining uncorrelated
windfarm sites can reduce required wind capacity by more than half for the same firm output,
thereby yielding fewer needed turbines, far fewer zero-output hours, and easier integration.

A broader assessment of reliability tends not to favor nuclear power. Of all 132 U.S. nuclear
plants built—just over half of the 253 originally ordered—21% were permanently and
prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems. Another 27% have completely failed for a
year or more at least once. The surviving U.S. nuclear plants have lately averaged ~90% of their
full-load full-time potential—a major improvement31 for which the industry deserves much
credit—but they are still not fully dependable. Even reliably-running nuclear plants must shut
down, on average, for ~39 days every ~17 months for refueling and maintenance. Unexpected
failures occur too, shutting down upwards of a billion watts in milliseconds, often for weeks to
months. Solar cells and windpower don’t fail so ungracefully.

Power plants can fail for reasons other than mechanical breakdown, and those reasons can affect
many plants at once. As France and Japan have learned to their cost, heavily nuclear-dependent
regions are particularly at risk because drought, earthquake, a serious safety problem, or a
terrorist incident could close many plants simultaneously. And nuclear power plants have a
unique further disadvantage: for neutron-physics reasons, they can’t quickly restart after an
emergency shutdown, such as occurs automatically in a grid power failure...

From Amory Lovins
Four Nuclear Myths: A Commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on Similar Writings

Journal or Magazine Article, 2009

Available for download: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-09_FourNuclearMyths

Some nuclear-power advocates claim that wind and solar power can’t provide much if any reliable power because they’re not “baseload,” that they use too much land, that all energy options including new nuclear build are needed to combat climate change, and that nuclear power’s economics don’t matter because climate change will force governments to dictate energy choices and pay for whatever is necessary. None of these claims can withstand analytic scrutiny.

Abstract here: http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Full article for download here: http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/revsolglobwarmairpol.htm


Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c

Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

Abstract
This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

[Odin2005]

9. Lovins is a proven con-man.

[kristopher]

10. No, you are a proven pronuclear faceless accuser on an anonymous internet forum.

[Nihil]

11. ... or so claims a proven antinuclear faceless accuser on an anonymous internet forum ...

:crazy:

[Odin2005]

12. Oh, SNAP!

:D