<Peak Oil Aware NY Governor?The Oil DrumSmart Metering and Smarter Metering>
<DrumBeat: November 1, 2006DrumBeatDrumBeat: November 3, 2006>

307 comments on DrumBeat: November 2, 2006

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

JN2 on November 2, 2006 - 9:32am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Some thoughts on options to nuclear:

Given the relative cost and financial risk of Canadian or U.S. nuclear, you have to have a very restrictive set of options or strange idea of economics to conclude a nuclear plant makes any sense.

-- Amory Lovins in an interview with the Toronto Star. Recommended.

0
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
BobCousins on November 2, 2006 - 9:40am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Isn't Amory a lifelong opponent of nuclear power, going back to his Friends of the Earth days?

I don't mind people having a political stance, but they should make this clear up front, rather than hide their viewpoint in a cost analysis.

0
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
NeverLNG on November 2, 2006 - 10:16am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
economics drives politics.

where is the surprise?

0
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
eric blair on November 2, 2006 - 10:36am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
rather than hide their viewpoint in a cost analysis.

Rather than explain why the cost analysis is wrong, attack the person who put it together supports fission power exactly how?

At some point its looking like Iran is going to be attacked over the issue of 'you have a nuclear plant and are not making a bomb/no you are making a bomb'.   Because nuclear fission power is allowed, 'cover' exists for bomb-making.  

Wonder what assigns the external cost of bombing a nation's fission plants?   Or having a military 'fighting terror over there so they don't attack fission plants here'? Or having a civilization using wind/PV and forgoing fission due to the high cost?

0
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
raymond on November 2, 2006 - 11:07am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I find it odd to describe Amory Lovin's stance as "political".

Yes he is a long-time opponent of nuclear energy. In the '70s as a scientist and as an environmentalist he laid out a "soft path" to energy policy based on increasing efficiency. At that time he suggested that the economics of nuclear power was an illusion and many utilities would have profited handsomely had they followed his advice rather than sink billions into investments that never paid off. (of course, utilities that subsequently purchased those same assets for pennies on the dollar and shifted disposal costs and risk premiums to US taxpayers have done well)

Recently he published a work - Winning the Oil End Game -  funded by the US Dept of Defense. In this work he details a technology roadmap to substantially reduce our "oil addiction".

Clearly at this time any stance vis-a-vis fossil fuels, nuclear power and energy could be described as political, economic or ecological. Does any such label add to or detract from the merits of an alternative approach to a reliance on a highly-centralized, capital-intensive business-as-usual demand-driven model for generating, delivering and consuming energy?

0
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
ElPrius on November 2, 2006 - 2:46pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Despite his claims to the contrary, I would hardly call Amory Lovins an "environmentalist."

The other day, I was browsing in a used bookstore and happened upon a copy of his 1976 book "Soft Energy Paths."

Lovins' stance was adamantly anti-nuclear, yet he endorsed coal as a "transitional" source of energy in his pipe dream of going away from nuclear toward solar and wind!

Granted, few people knew much about global warming in those days, but the facts were certainly known about particulate and sulfur dioxide emissions from coal.  Yet, Lovins liked coal better than nuclear energy...despite the fact that coal dumps its wastes right out into the atmosphere!

0
Comments can no longer be added to this story.