Energy Strategy: the Road Not Taken

[kristopher]

Energy Strategy: the Road Not Taken
AUTHOR: Lovins, Amory
DOCUMENT ID: E77-01
YEAR: 1976
DOCUMENT TYPE: Journal or Magazine Article
PUBLISHER: Foreign Affairs


In this landmark piece from 1976, Amory Lovins describes the two energy choices then facing the nation. There is the "hard path" and the "soft path". This path resembles federal policy of the time and is essentially an extrapolation of the recent past. The hard path relies on rapid expansion of centralized high technologies to increase supplies of energy, especially in the form of electricity. The second path combines a prompt and serious commitment to efficient use of energy, rapid development of renewable energy sources matched in scale and in energy quality to end-use needs, and special transitional fossil-fuel technologies. This path diverges radically from incremental past practices to pursue long-term goals. Lovins argues that both paths present difficult—but very different—problems. The first path is convincingly familiar, but the economic and sociopolitical problems then facing the nation loomed large and insuperable. The second path, though it represents a shift in direction, offers many social, economic and geopolitical advantages, including virtual elimination of nuclear proliferation from the world. For Lovins, it is important to recognize that the two paths are mutually exclusive. Because commitments to the first may foreclose the second, Lovins argues that we must choose one or the other—before failure to stop nuclear proliferation has foreclosed both.



Download this environmental classic at http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E77-01_EnergyStrategyRoadNotTaken

[DrGregory]

1. Lovins doesn't know of what he speaks.

The second path, though it represents a shift in direction, offers many social, economic and geopolitical advantages, including virtual elimination of nuclear proliferation from the world.
========================================================================

Just because a country doesn't have a nuclear power program doesn't mean
that it can't make a nuclear weapon.

We see that today with Iran. Iran, with help from Russia, is building a
nuclear power plant; but it is not operational.

However, Iran is knocking at the door of having nuclear weapons due to
the Natanz enrichment facility. The reactor isn't helping them get nuclear
weapons - it's not even operational. In fact recent news stories say that
they are just now getting around to fueling it.

Lovins is giving the world a false hope. As per Lovins, one merely has to
stop a nation from building nuclear power plants and they can't make a bomb.

BALONEY!! Nations like Iran that want nuclear weapons, and have made the
political calculation that they are going to get nuclear weapons; can make
nuclear weapons WITHOUT a reactor. They just have to build the enrichment plant.

After all; the Little Boy bomb that the USA vaporized Hiroshima with did NOT
have any of the product of the Hanford production nuclear reactors.

What Little Boy had for its bomb fuel was the product of the K-25 and Y-12 facilities
at Oak Ridge. If the USA had not built Hanford, the USA would still have been
able to make the Little Boy bomb. But the fuel for Little Boy did NOT come from
reactors - production or commercial power - reactors. The high enriched uranium
for Little Boy came from the Oak Ridge plants which any nation could duplicate
irrespective if they have a nuclear power program.

Nations build nuclear weapons because they want them; not as some offshoot of a
nuclear power program.

In fact, ALL the current states that possess nuclear weapons had those weapons
before they had power reactors.

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

2. That must be why...

...every expert in the world rates nuclear weapons proliferation as a major problem for nuclear power.

The renewable option: Is it real?
SUNLIGHT: 100,000 TW reaches Earth’s surface (100,000 TWy/year = 3.15 million EJ/yr), 30% on land. Thus 1% of the land area receives 300 TWy/yr, so converting this to usable forms at 10% efficiency would yield 30 TWy/yr, about twice civilization’s rate of energy use in 2004.

WIND: Solar energy flowing into the wind is ~2,000 TW. Wind power estimated to be harvestable from windy sites covering 2% of Earth’s land surface is about twice world electricity generation in 2004.

BIOMASS: Solar energy is stored by photosynthesis on land at a rate of about 60 TW. Energy crops at twice the average terrestrial photosynthetic yield would give 12 TW from 10% of land area (equal to what’s now used for agriculture). Converted to liquid biofuels at 50% efficiency, this would be 6 TWy/yr, more than world oil use in 2004.

Renewable energy potential is immense. Questions are what it will cost & how much society wants to pay for environmental & security advantages.

The nuclear option: size of the challenges
• If world electricity demand grows 2%/year until 2050 and nuclear share of electricity supply is to rise from 1/6 to 1/3...

–nuclear capacity would have to grow from 350 GWe in 2000 to 1700 GWe in 2050;

– this means 1,700 reactors of 1,000 MWe each.

• If these were light-water reactors on the once-through fuel cycle...
---–enrichment of their fuel will require ~250 million Separative Work Units (SWU);
---–diversion of 0.1% of this enrichment to production of HEU from natural uranium would make ~20 gun-type or ~80 implosion-type bombs.

• If half the reactors were recycling their plutonium...
---–the associated flow of separated, directly weapon - usable plutonium would be 170,000 kg per year;
---–diversion of 0.1% of this quantity would make ~30 implosion-type bombs.

• Spent-fuel production in the once-through case would be...
---–34,000 tonnes/yr, a Yucca Mountain every two years.

Conclusion: Expanding nuclear enough to take a modest bite out of the climate problem is conceivable, but doing so will depend on greatly increased seriousness in addressing the waste-management & proliferation challenges.

Mitigation of Human-Caused Climate Change
John P. Holdren, Presidential Science Advisor

[DrGregory]

4. As usual - backward logic.

...every expert in the world rates nuclear weapons proliferation as a major problem for nuclear power.
===================================================================

The problem with your "logic" is that EVEN IF you eliminated the nuclear
power program - you have NO GUARANTEE that a nation that desires a nuclear
weapon won't just enrich natural uranium found within its borders to HEU
via centrifuges or some other enrichment technology.

Do you understand the logic concept of "not sufficient"?

If is "not sufficient" to forbid nuclear power to a nuclear weapon
state wannabe.

Again, Iran is the perfect example. Iran currently has NO nuclear
power reactors running. Yet Iran is knocking on the door of having
nuclear weapons.

Iran got there NOT by extracting plutonium from spent reactor fuel.
Iran got there by enriching natural uranium.

Even if we were to prevent the Iranian power plant from starting -
we still have the problem posed by the enrichment plant at Natanz.

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

5. Are you really that thick?

[NNadir]

3. That was defintely classic Lovins, insufferably stuipid, unreferenced,

filled with wishful thinking, and of course lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of praise for wildcat "distributed" coal.

It was distributed energy ignorance at it's worst, a libertarian call for point source pollutants everywhere, pure car CULTist stuff.

It's a great thing that Lovins has been internationally discredited and is seen for the dangerous fossil fuel shill he is.

The best, the absolute best, rip up of that total moron was Vaclav Smil's long review in http://www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/smil-article-2000-pdr2000.pdf">Population and Development Reviews where Smil, a certifiable genius and polymath, ripped that pathetic BP funded mystic a new asshole, not that you can fit too much more asshole into Amory Lovins.