There’s one issue that President Bush and presidential hopefuls John McCain
and Barack Obama all agree on: expanding the use of nuclear power. We speak with
Amory Lovins, the co-founder, chairman and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain
Institute in Colorado, who has been described as “one of the Western world’s
most influential energy thinkers.” [includes rush transcript]
Guest:
Amory Lovins, co-founder, chairman and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain
Institute in Colorado.
AMY GOODMAN: There’s one issue President Bush and presidential hopefuls John
McCain and Barack Obama all agree on: expanding the use of nuclear power.
President Bush addressed nuclear power at a news conference Tuesday and hailed
it as a way to reduce American dependence on oil and protect the environment.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: This is just a transition period. I mean, all of us
want to get away from reliance upon hydrocarbons, but it’s not going to happen
overnight. You know, one of these days, people are going to be using battery
technologies in their cars. You’ve heard me say this a lot, and I’m confident
it’s going to happen. And, you know, the throwaway line, of course, is that your
car won’t have to look like a golf cart. But the question then becomes, where
are we going to get electricity? And that’s why I’m a big believer in nuclear
power, to be able to make us less dependent on oil and better stewards of the
environment. But there is a transition period during the hydrocarbon era, and it
hasn’t ended yet, as our people now know. Gasoline prices are high..
AMY GOODMAN: And this is presidential hopefuls Barack Obama, beginning with,
though, Senator John McCain, on nuclear power.
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I actually think that we should explore nuclear power as part
of the energy mix. There are no silver bullets to this issue. We’ve got to
develop solar. I’ve proposed drastically increasing fuel-efficiency standards on
cars, an aggressive cap on the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted.
But we’re going to have to try a series of different approaches.
SEN. JOHN McCAIN: My dear friends, nuclear power must be part of any equation
that leads to addressing climate change and also leads to addressing reduction
of our dependence on foreign oil. You know, we always love to imitate the
French. The French, 80 percent of their electricity in France is generated by
nuclear power. We either got to reprocess it or store it.
AMY GOODMAN: Senator John McCain, and before that, Senator Barack Obama.
Well, the debate over nuclear power is back in the news with the admission of
Energy Department official Ward Sproat on Tuesday that it would cost taxpayers
$90 billion to open and operate the nation’s first nuclear waste dump. Speaking
after a congressional hearing, Sproat added the dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada
would open only in 2020. It was originally estimated to cost $58 billion and
open in 1998.
Well, our next guest has been described as “one of the Western world’s most
influential energy thinkers.” He’s also a leading opponent of nuclear power.
Amory Lovins is co-founder, chair and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain
Institute in Colorado. He is a consultant physicist, MacArthur Fellow, and
recipient of numerous awards, including the Right Livelihood Award. Lovins
advised the energy and other industries in countries around the world, including
here in the US. He invented the hybrid Hypercar in ’91 and has written
twenty-nine books, including Soft Energy Paths, Natural Capitalism, Small Is
Profitable, and Winning the Oil Endgame. Amory Lovins joins us here in our
firehouse studio.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
AMORY LOVINS: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, talk about nuclear power. Why
do you feel it’s not an option, given the oil crisis?
AMORY LOVINS: Well, first of all, electricity and oil have essentially nothing
to do with each other, and anybody who thinks the contrary is really ignorant
about energy. Less than two percent of our electricity is made from oil. Less
than two percent of our oil makes electricity. Those numbers are falling. And
essentially, all the oil involved is actually the heavy, gooey bottom of the
barrel you can’t even make mobility fuels out of anyway.
What nuclear would do is displace coal, our most abundant domestic fuel. And
this sounds good for climate, but actually, expanding nuclear makes climate
change worse, for a very simple reason. Nuclear is incredibly expensive. The
costs have just stood up on end lately. Wall Street Journal recently reported
that they’re about two to four times the cost that the industry was talking
about just a year ago. And the result of that is that if you buy more nuclear
plants, you’re going to get about two to ten times less climate solution per
dollar, and you’ll get it about twenty to forty times slower, than if you buy
instead the cheaper, faster stuff that is walloping nuclear and coal and gas,
all kinds of central plans, in the marketplace. And those competitors are
efficient use of electricity and what’s called micropower, which is both
renewables, except big hydro, and making electricity and heat together, in fact,
recent buildings, which takes about half of the money, fuel and carbon of making
them separately, as we normally do.
So, nuclear cannot actually deliver the climate or the security benefits claimed
for it. It’s unrelated to oil. And it’s grossly uneconomic, which means the
nuclear revival that we often hear about is not actually happening. It’s a very
carefully fabricated illusion. And the reason it isn’t happening is there are no
buyers. That is, Wall Street is not putting a penny of private capital into the
industry, despite 100-plus percent subsidies.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
AMORY LOVINS: It’s uneconomic. It costs, for example, about three times as much
as wind power, which is booming.
Let me give you some numbers about what’s happening in the marketplace, because
that’s reality, as far as I’m concerned. I really take markets seriously. 2006,
the last full year of data we have, nuclear worldwide added a little bit of
capacity, more than all of it from upgrading old plants, because the new ones
they built were smaller than the retirements of old plants. So they added 1.4
billion watts. Sounds like a lot. Well, it’s about one big plant’s worth
worldwide. That was less than photovoltaics, solar cells added in capacity. It
was a tenth what wind power added. It was a thirtieth to a fortieth of what
micropower added.
AMY GOODMAN: What’s micropower?
AMORY LOVINS: Again, it’s renewables, other than big hydro, plus co-generating
electricity and heat together, usually in industry.
In 2006, micropower, for the first time, produced more electricity worldwide
than nuclear did. A sixth of the world’s electricity is now micropower, a third
of the new electricity. In a dozen industrial countries, micropower makes
anywhere from a sixth to over half of all the electricity elsewhere. This is not
a fringe activity anymore.
China, which has the world’s most ambitious nuclear program, by the end of 2006
had seven times that much capacity in distributed renewables, and they were
growing it seven times faster. Take a look at 2007, in which the US or Spain or
China added more wind capacity than the world added nuclear capacity. The US
added more wind capacity last year than we’ve added coal capacity in the past
five years put together.
And renewables, other than big hydro, got last year $71 billion of private
capital; nuclear, as usual, got zero. It is only bought by central planners with
a draw on the public purse. What does this tell you? I mean, what part of the
story does anybody who take markets seriously not get?
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, well, the media clearly in this country doesn’t get it,
because it is raised over and over again by the candidates. I mean, it seems
that Senator McCain has a favorite number: a hundred years in Iraq, also hoping
for a hundred more new nuclear power plants. He had said something about, he
doesn’t want to lose the knowledge of building, since the last one was built
more than thirty years ago; the people are dying who had built it, so we’ve got
to rush and build them now.
AMORY LOVINS: Well, you could say that’s already been lost, in the sense that
most of a nuclear plant built now in the US, if there were any, would have to be
imported, which, by the way, means we buy it in weak US dollars, which is part
of the incredible cost escalation we’ve seen. Moody’s latest number is $7,500 a
kilowatt. That’s, again, as the Journal said, about two to four times the
numbers that were being bandied about just last year by promoters.
AMY GOODMAN: And Barack Obama, while he hasn’t laid out a plan for building, he
has a big campaign contributor, Exelon, and has supported the expansion of
nuclear power. And, of course, we heard what President Bush has to say.
AMORY LOVINS: Actually, I thought what Senator Obama said was “explore”, which
is different. And you will find major environmental groups saying something like
“explore” or “consider”, but they will also say very carefully it has to be
competitive, it has to be cost-effective. And clearly, that doesn’t even pass
the giggle test.
A new nuclear plant, according to Moody’s, would send out electricity for about
fifteen cents a kilowatt-hour, which is half, again, as much as the average
residential rate. And that doesn’t even account for delivering it to your house.
And I think if nuclear plants were built, which I don’t think is likely, you
would see incredible rates shock and a big political reaction.
AMY GOODMAN: Environmentalists like Stewart Brand and James Lovelock are pushing
nuclear power.
AMORY LOVINS: There are actually four individuals involved in the world who are
prominent environmentalists who had that view, and you’ve named two of them.
AMY GOODMAN: Who are the other two?
AMORY LOVINS: Patrick Moore was active in founding Greenpeace back in the ’70s,
now works for industry; and Peter Schwartz, who used to be on my board, who used
to run group planning for Royal Dutch/Shell, is of the same view. But I can’t
think of any others. There are no actual environmental groups who favor nuclear
power.
AMY GOODMAN: What is your answer to them, and why have they arrived—these are
your old colleagues?
AMORY LOVINS: Well, yeah, a couple of them are old friends. Well, I think they
haven’t done their homework. And I keep asking for their analysis and not
getting it, because I don’t think they have one. But they somehow form the view
that because nuclear doesn’t emit carbon, it must be a good thing. Well, that’s
not good enough.
You need a source that doesn’t emit carbon—nuclear emits a little bit in the
fuel cycle and in building plants, and so on. But you need one that doesn’t emit
carbon and is faster and cheaper than other ways to do the same thing. You see,
renewables don’t emit carbon. Efficiency doesn’t emit carbon. Cogeneration based
on recovered waste heat you were throwing away anyhow doesn’t emit carbon,
because you already paid for the carbon in making the useful part of the heat in
industry. And these sources are a great deal cheaper and faster than nuclear. So
if climate’s a problem, we need to invest judiciously, not indiscriminately, to
get the most solution per dollar, the most solution per year. Otherwise, we’re
making things worse.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Amory Lovins. He is co-founder, chair and chief
scientist at Rocky Mountain Institute, which is based in Aspen in Colorado?
AMORY LOVINS: Old Snowmass.
AMY GOODMAN: Old Snowmass. Nuclear power is one of the issues that is being
posed as an alternative to reliance on foreign fuel, and this is also an issue
we addressed yesterday with Naomi Klein on Democracy Now!, the issue of
expanding oil drilling, offshore and onshore. You’ve been looking at this.
AMORY LOVINS: Well, we seem to be wanting to drill in all the wrong places. For
example, over fifty times as much oil as might be under the Arctic Refuge at
very high prices can be saved at very low prices by using the oil efficiently.
Also many times faster. So, my wildcatters have been drilling lately in the
Detroit formation. That is, making efficient cars is equivalent to finding an
all-American Saudi Arabia under Detroit, about eight-and-a-half million barrels
a day, inexhaustible, climate-safe and costing about twelve bucks a barrel. Now,
altogether, there is about 14 million barrels a day of oil savings, averaging
twelve bucks a barrel cost. And we know exactly where the oil is. There’s no
doubt that it’s there. It’s under Detroit, Seattle, and so on. That’s out of
twenty-or-so million barrels a day we’re using. So if you’re an oil company and
you go to the ends of the earth and drill for very expensive oil that might not
even be there, wouldn’t it be embarrassing if somebody else meanwhile found all
that cheap oil under Detroit? Shouldn’t we drill the most prospective place
first?
I’ve tried this formulation lately on the American Association of Petroleum
Geologists and the American Petroleum Institute, and they found it pretty
persuasive. You know, I’ve worked for major oil companies for about thirty-five
years, and they understand how expensive it is to drill for oil. Take the Arctic
Refuge as an example. You might think that at today’s oil prices, it would be
clearly a great deal to go drill there. Well, it wasn’t before, when oil was in
the twenty-odd dollar a barrel range instead of $140. And that’s why the oil
companies weren’t interested. Guess what. They’re still not interested. Why not?
Well, because their costs of drilling have gone up more than the oil price went
up. If you talk to people who run exploration in major oil companies, they’re
still not excited about the Arctic Refuge, because practically any other place
in the world they could drill would be cheaper and less risky than that
extraordinarily remote and hostile environment.
AMY GOODMAN: So why is Bush pushing it?
AMORY LOVINS: Who knows? But it doesn’t make any economic sense. There’s no
business case for it. And the real showstopper, interestingly, is national
security, which you would think that he and Senator McCain and so on would be
concerned about. Jim Woolsey, a not-hostile-to-oil, per se, Oklahoman, former—
AMY GOODMAN: Former CIA director.
AMORY LOVINS: —former CIA director, has actually testified against Arctic Refuge
drilling on national security grounds. There’s a very simple reason. There’s
only one way to get the oil south: it’s through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which
is the most vulnerable part of our energy infrastructure, the biggest terrorist
target in our energy infrastructure. It’s what he calls Uncle Sam’s “kick me”
sign.
So, think about it. You’ve got an 800-mile pipeline, mostly above ground, mostly
accessible by road or by floatplane. And if the flow through it is interrupted
in the winter for about a week, 900—well, nine million barrels of hot oil
congeals into the world’s largest Chapstick, a big candle. Then you can’t pump
it anymore. Could this happen? Well, actually, yes, if certain points on the
pipeline, pumping stations and so on, were attacked—
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve got five seconds.
AMORY LOVINS: —or stuff at either end. And has that happened? Well, let’s see.
It’s been sabotaged, almost blew itself up on occasion through mismanagement.
It’s been incompetently bombed twice. It’s been shot at fifty times. A drunk
shut it down with one hole from a rifle bullet. And the scariest thing to me is
around Y2K, at the turn of the century, a disgruntled engineer was caught by
accident about to blow up three critical points with fourteen bombs he had built
and tested.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. But one answer: have we
solved the nuclear waste problem even?
AMORY LOVINS: No, but I’d just come off the wagon on the economics, and then we
don’t need to argue about whether it’s safe.
AMY GOODMAN: Amory Lovins, head of Rocky Mountain Institute, thanks for joining
us.