Amory Lovins’s Posts

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  Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic 197

  Posted 1 month, 2 weeks agoStewart Brand has a new book coming out, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. Brand argues, among other things, that environmentalists should reconsider nuclear power. Amory Lovins responds with a thanks, but no thanks.

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Amory Lovins’s Recent Comments

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  I’m sure the participants in this conversation welcome Stewart Brand’s 1 November commentary and his request that we return to the subject. In that spirit, I suggest that this exchange isn’t about whether the new German government will extend nuclear plants’ 32-year operating lives, nor whether the world’s radiological protection authorities will reverse their bedrock assumption, nor about three typos or more serious errors I identified. Rather, it’s about Stewart’s sweeping thesis and how none of its four pillars survive analytic scrutiny. My commentary and its technical backup paper show that: 1. he ignores or improperly rejects via the baseload fallacy all non-nuclear alternatives; 2. he has the nuclear-vs.-renewables land-use comparison backwards, wrong by 2–6 orders of magnitude; 3. he quotes as the sole basis for his we-need-everything claim a paper that contradicts it; and 4. his assertion that these three erroneous claims make nuclear power so essential that its economics don’t matter is upside-down. It is precisely nuclear’s poor economics that have cut its global share of the new-electric-capacity market to a few percent. The competition is no longer between coal and nuclear, but between nuclear and other technologies (efficiency and micropower) that beat both coal and nuclear. In addition, I cited a rebuttal of Stewart's “microreactor” suggestion (www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-07_NuclearSameOldStory), and explained why the nuclear expansion he urges would reduce and retard our shared goal of climate protection. These are not details but fundamentals. Regrettably, Stewart doesn’t engage on any of them. He says, “Amory’s [technical] paper…has some valuable information,” but ignores its content. He asks, “How about the validity of Amory’s overall argument?,” but never addresses it. Interestingly, he praises my critique, and in a recent joint NPR interview urged others to read it, but doesn’t acknowledge that it refutes his thesis.On Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 week ago 197 Responses

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  Sometimes when I or others see my above posting, it is full of bizarre characters not in my uploaded original. I'll send the original separately to the moderator and ask him kindly to try to repost it without the character translation errors. Further on MAX8806's comment about the MIT 2009 update study: it shows 8.4¢ nuclear beats coal under moderate (6.2¢) or high (7.2¢) fuel-price assumptions. Naturally, and consistently with my postings, nuclear could beat coal on these figures if carbon emissions are priced high enough. However, my thesis is that nuclear and coal (and gas) all lose to efficiency and micropower, regardless of carbon price. That is what observed market behavior is telling us loud and clear, as summarized in my technical backup paper.On Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month, 1 week ago 197 Responses

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  I'm going to have to drop off this thread for travel, but wanted to respond to Rod Adams's 1050 16 Oct 09 post: If you don't like all or part of the US financial community, you might like to know that the $100 billion of private new investment that renewables (except big hydro) got last year was from investors all over the world. If you don't like anything the private marketplace does, and prefer the choices made by centrally planned systems, then our differences are not just about technology and economics but also about political philosophy. To paraphrase Churchill, market democracies are the worst system of government--except for all the rest. Your military service, which I appreciate, was devoted to protecting our own market democracy. It is far from perfect, and we all try in our different ways to make it better. Compared to competing options, fission is a pretty good way to run strategically important long-range nuclear submarines (and probably carriers, though the economics are awful for medium surface combatants). But compared to competing options, fission is a grossly uneconomic way to increase electricity supply in any country I know, which is over 50 of them. One technology does not fit all uses. As I posted, the best independent scholar of energy subsidies is Doug Koplow. His work is all posted at earthtrack.net. The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2009, published 27 Aug 09 by the German Environment Ministry, is coauthored by Doug and has an excellent section on US and UK nuclear subsidies (the UK part by Steve Thomas, a British professor of finance). The Calvert Cliffs 3 case-study on the Earth Track homepage is also instructive. If you click on "Learn about subsidies," you'll find a nice tutorial hyperlinked to, among other things, Earth Track's subsidy reference library and its reports and papers. One of those, at http://energy.annualreviews.org/cgi/content/full/ 26/1/361ijkey=2zGcFva7fLEMA&keytype=ref&siteid=arjournals, in the energy journal of record, reviews all major US subsidy studies in the past three decades. EIA's subsidy work (1992 and 1999) is well known to be analytically flawed, as Koplow specifies at http://www.earthtrack.net/earthtrack/library/Eiarep4.doc; among other things, as Koplow says, "The subsidies are far too narrowly defined; important programs they view as subsidies were not added into their total values either due to how the study was scoped or to measurement problems; they do not look at off-budget subsidies in any detail; and they exclude any subsidies of large, but not sole, benefit to the energy sector." The 2008 EIA study to which you refer was commissioned by Senator Lamar Alexander, a champion of nuclear energy and its subsidies, and was again framed specifically to produce the distorted and incorrect result you quote. Koplow details these flaws in a new report to be published shortly at earthtrack.net. (Note that I am not saying EIA is dishonest; only that they are charged to answer the specific questions they are asked, and Senator Alexander framed the question to get the result he wanted.) Your belief that wind and sun were "dismissed by many generations of smart people as not worth the effort to capture" is incorrect. Both classes of technologies have been developed repeatedly to high levels of sophistication and wide levels of adoption in many cultures over the past few thousand years. See Butti & Perlin, A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980 (new edition now in preparation). Typically, these achievements were suppressed by discoveries of apparently cheap fuels -- wood for the Roman Empire, then coal, then oil, then gas. I think that sequence is about done. Nuclear energy is a significant source of electricity (~19% of U.S. and 14% of world TWh/y). This has been achieved, however, at a high accounting cost (see e.g. Koomey & Hultman, En. Pol. 35:5630-5642, 2007) and an even higher opportunity cost. You refer to an energy return and to the cash-cow nature of sunk-cost nuclear plants (which is like saying one's house is very cheap to own...except for the mortgage). I do not think you can make an empirically based business case that the existing nuclear power plant fleet has been economically worthwhile (counting all externalities at zero), nor that there is any business case for building more. This is of course an empirical question. My papers present and cite extensive empirical evidence on it. You provide none. Frankly, I think nuclear advocates would be better served if they focused more on economics, because then they would really understand, in a way the industry doesn't now understand, what its competitors are. On present form, the nuclear industry will meet its end never knowing what did it in, because the technologies beating it worst in the global marketplace are ones it doesn't acknowledge as legitimate competitors. It was in the hope of conveying this message that I started offering a modern economic comparison to the industry in my Dec 05 Nuclear Engineering International article "Mighty Mice." As a lifelong technologist and innovator, and a student of nuclear power for 40+ years, I've come to a different conclusion than you have about its promise. However, I think that holding the beliefs and enthusiasms you do, you should simply invest your money in the nuclear enterprises and projects that you think look promising. I don't plan to, and I don't think taxpayers should be forced to.On Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month, 1 week ago 197 Responses

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  Very briefly: with few exceptions, renewables and efficiency are far less subsidized than nuclear power, and far less driven or determined by government policy. Mr. Rodgers's statement about "a backup generation source is necessary" is incorrect and asymmetrical (all generators need balancing and integration somehow, and a diversified renewable portfolio tends to need less for the reasons explained in my tech paper and its references). I didn't say nuclear is "bad," but that for pretty clear reasons it is less attractive to investors than the micropower and efficiency investments that are walloping nuclear (and other central plants) in the global marketplace. Renewables and efficiency are an excellent hedge against volatile gas prices and, in significant quantities, can markedly improve the risk/reward performance of the whole supply portfolio; that's why RPS saves customers money even if renewables cost more, which they generally don't. I consider the new (from Aug 05) nuclear subsidies, on top of the old ones, that are comparable to or exceed new nuclear construction cost to be "strong" support (see earthtrack.net for detailed assessments by Doug Koplow, the best independent scholar of energy subsidies). US Federal policy has been driven by strong fossil-fuel AND nuclear lobbying and predilections. I do not think the literature bears out Mr. Rodgers's claim that we cannot "dramatically affect the ppm levels...for 20-30 years at best," and am curious how he would support this conclusion. I did not claim there is a "limited resource pool that will run out 10 years from now," but I do think we need to allocate capital judiciously and take opportunity costs seriously. I do not know on what economic, technical, or operational basis nuclear plants can be said to be "the true direct competitors, and therefore the replacements to," coal- and gas-fired central power plants; this seems simply a disguised version of the "baseload" claim debunked in my papers. A short lay treatment of this issue is at freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/amory-lovins/.On Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month, 2 weeks ago 197 Responses

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  (continued:) Your statement that, based on your incorrect "below 20%" capacity factors, “more wind turbines and solar panels must be built, up to and exceeding 5X the nameplate capacity” seems to me relevant to cost/kW but irrelevant to my analysis, which compares levelized cost per kWh and therefore already counts each resource’s capacity factor. For example, the average price at which new U.S. windfarms connected in 2008 sold their power was $51.5/MWh busbar (id.), net of a Production Tax Credit with a levelized aftertax value around $10/MWh; the price reflects actual capacity factors. As for correlation between wind sites, please see my tech paper’s notes 29-30 for wind: picking anticorrelated sites for your portfolio can easily save half the capacity for the same firm output. And the flip side of PVs’ going dark at night is that they have exceptionally well peak-correlated output in the daytime (especially on sunny afternoons), greatly increasing their value (www.smallisprofitable.org). I think you may be misinterpreting the Texas 26 Feb 08 event; the 1.4-GW drop in wind output was not an important cause of the power disturbance you cite. The initial press stories, e.g. www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2749522920080228 and the Star-Telegram’s story, didn’t mention larger and steeper simultaneous shortfalls in supplies scheduled by several non-wind energy providers, nor unexpectedly and rapidly spiking demand, nor the operators’ inadequate use of the accurate wind forecast data, nor ERCOT’s use of a zonal rather than a nodal market. In summary, in the 40 minutes before load curtailment began, wind output fell 80 MW vs. its schedule, non-wind generation fell 350 MW vs. its schedule, and load rose 1,185 above forecast. A good explanation is at www.awea.org/newsroom/pdf/AWEA_Viewpoint_on_ERCOT_event_031208.pdf. The U.S. is about 200 times the size and has about 100 times the electricity use and 1,000 times the wind resource of Denmark; thus it enjoys both large, highly diversified wind resources and strong integration options. DOE (20percentwind.org) already found no significant problem with 20% windpower by 2030, nor has isolated Ireland’s grid found a planned initial 40% problematic (www.dcenr.gov.ie/Energy/North-South+Co-operation+in+the+Energy+Sector/All+Island+Electricity+Grid+Study.htm); indeed, about 40% was recently achieved on especially windy days in both Ireland and Spain. Annual wind fractions of 30–40%, sometimes over 100%, now prevail in five states of Germany. The Danish grid does indeed exchange with Norwegian/Swedish hydropower and German coal power, yet Spain (12% windpowered) and Portugal (9%) achieve stability without those close balancing ties to strong grids. You don’t address my comparison (further explored in my refs. 4-5) between the failure modes and impacts of central thermal plants vs. a diverse, dispersed, mainly renewable portfolio; evidently my point was not sufficiently clear. If we can agree that all resources need grid integration and that its cost needs to be symmetrically compared under the same firm-delivery objective, then I think you’ll find stability is at least as easily and cheaply achieved in a high-renewables as in a high-nuclear world.On Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month, 2 weeks ago 197 Responses