I would be remiss in not pointing you to a blockbuster paper by Amory Lovins from September that I’ve only just now read. I scanned his article in Grist at the time in which he thoroughly debunks Stewart Brand’s support for nuclear power. Here are the four myths he shatters:
- 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;
- those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
- all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
- nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to protect the climate.
If Amory Lovins were Barack Obama’s Secretary of Energy, we’d be more than halfway home to solving the climate crisis. Instead, we have Steven Chu’s nuclear boondoggle. (In Chu’s defense, though, I have to say that the political “thinkers” in the White House are pushing nukes too because they think they’ll “win votes.”)
Read Lovins’s paper because it shows us how manifestly successful renewables and energy efficiency are now and how much more they can be.