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• True Cost Accounting for Nuclear Power

GELLERMAN: There are "dangerously high" radiation levels in water leaking from Reactor number 3 at Japan's Fukushima plant. At our deadline, operators still struggling to gain control of the facility, fear the core might be breached. Prime Minister Kan calls the situation "grave and unpredictable" and officials are urging those within 19 miles of the nuclear plant to leave voluntarily, and avoid eating many kinds of green vegetables. To say the least, the nuclear disaster in Japan has refocused attention on the future of the atom as a source of energy. But the threat of global climate change has led even some die hard environmentalists to reconsider and embrace nuclear power.
But not Amory Lovins. He’s chairman and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado.
Amory Lovins, welcome to Living on Earth!

LOVINS: Thank you
GELLERMAN: So is it possible that we can meet our carbon reduction targets without nuclear power?

LOVINS: Of course! Not only that, but we could do so more effectively and more cheaply. It is quite true that if a nuclear plant displaces a coal plant that would reduce carbon emissions. But if you spent the same money on efficiency, renewables and combined heat and power , you would reduce the carbon emissions by about two to ten times more and about 20 to 40 times faster. So nuclear is such a slow and costly climate solution, it actually reduces and retards climate protection, compared with a best buys first approach.

GELLERMAN: When you say it’s slow, isn’t it people like you that are holding up the process with lawsuits, holding up the process of licensing nuclear power plants?

LOVINS: Not in the least! I know the industry likes to blame environmental groups - of which, by the way, we are not one - for holding up licensing for several decades. New nuclear power plants in this country are offered subsidies that now rival or exceed their total construction costs. And yet, even though that’s been true since 2005, three years before the financial crash they’ve been unable to raise a penny of private capital, simply because the cost and risks are unfinanceable. Wall Street will not invest in them - it’s an utterly unfinanceable technology, and it’s obvious why - it’s grossly uncompetitive

GELLERMAN: But can renewables, like wind for example, produce enough energy, enough density to replace nuclear power plants, which are huge and hugely powerful. And, plus, the wind doesn’t blow on calm days.

LOVINS: Yeah, well, that’s two separate points. The first one - I’m afraid the industry got it backwards. Actually, if you properly do the math - and count if you count the whole nuclear fuel cycle, not just the power plant, not just the core of the reactor, but the occlusion zone, the uranium mining and so on, it turns out that wind power uses hundreds or thousands of times less land per kilowatt hour, then nuclear does. Even solar photovoltaics are about equal to or might be better than nuclear in that respect. As for the wind not blowing and the sun not shining all the time, that’s true. Every kind of power plant can fail. They differ, however, in how much fails at once, how often, how long and for what reasons and how predictably. You can predict pretty well when wind or solar will not work, but you cannot predict when a nuclear plant will fail. They break without warning about three to five percent of the time, big coal, nuclear plants are down about ten or twelve percent of the time - and for that reason, we’ve designed grids for over a century to cope with that intermittence that every power plant suffers from. So you don’t depend on any single plant, you depend on the whole grid. So it turns out, if you diversify renewables by type so they’re not all affected by weather the same way, you diversify them by location, so they don’t all see the same weather at the same time, and you integrate them with the resources on the grid, both power plants and ways to save or shift electric use, then you can have a larg

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