Another anti-nuclear anti-Shoreham protester who has evolved like me.

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/04/our_nuclear_future.php?page=1

Of course, since I value the ExternE reports, and I therefore know that nuclear energy is safer than most forms or renewable energy, especially biomass burning but also solar PV, unlike Caldeira, I am not a reluctant supporter of nuclear energy, but an enthusiastic one.

However, I started where Caldeira started. Although he hasn't gone as far, he's come a long way.

We were wrong at Shoreham, but we had less information than we have now, and so can be partially excused.

but because it was a poorly designed nuke plant.

Nuke plants can be safe and environmentally responsible, but they have to be designed and built correctly to be so. Shoreham wasn't.

Redstone

The plant would have operated perfectly well and saved many lives.

Our objections were pure bullshit. We increased the risk that Long Islanders face. Right now they burn trash on Long Island, and they burn gas. Half the Island is likely to go under water in the twenty-first century, and there will be a certain permanent evacuation, not just an imagined one. We insisted that there be an evacuation plan showing that everyone could get off of Long Island in half an hour because we could imagine a Three Mile Island type meltdown. But Three Mile Island did melt down and no such evacuation was necessary. But let me tell you, when the first global warming fired hurricane hits that Island, it's gonna be a Cajun redux, big time. There won't be any half-hour evacuation there either, and a lot of people will not be coming back. So we at Shoreham elevated a low probability event over a much higher probability event.

The reactor was essentially identical to the Millstone 1 plant that operated for 28 years without a single loss of life. Millstone 1 was built for a few hundred million dollars. It wasn't the world's greatest nuclear reactor, but even as a largely failed reactor, Millstone if it operated at 70% capacity in its lifetime, prevented the burning of 11.3 million tons of coal and the release of 48 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air. I'm sure that much coal and carbon dioxide, not to mention sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxides and various heavy metals would have likely hurt far more many people than Millstone ever did. Thus even a poor reactor is not as much a miserable failure as the fossil fuel plant that would replace it.

I was an ignorant kid at the time, with a poor appreciation of science and engineering, and no comprehension of risk analysis specifically or critical thinking in general. But I have undone my ignorance over the years. We were wrong. It is the greatest environmental regret of my life.

In fact, the beginning of the Shoreham movement had nothing to do with Shoreham itself, but with the plans to build a reactor at Lloyd's Neck, where the rich folks live. That's what doomed nuclear power on Long Island, good old fashioned NIMBY puffed up with lots of money. The crap about the poor quality of the reactor is a direct consequence of the retrofitting we demaned for increasingly dopey reasons.

In the intervening years, many people on Long Island have certainly died from air pollution, some of it associated with Al D'Amato's garbage burning electrical plant.

We were wrong, and future generations will pay big time for what we did.

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Amory Lovins was closest of anyone to being right
on energy forcasts in the 70s.
He's probably right now, too.

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Enthusiasts claim hypothetical new reactors might deliver a kilowatt-hour for 6¢, vs. 10+¢ for post-1980 plants. (Nearly 3¢ pays for delivery to customers.) But super-efficient gas plants or windfarms cost 5-6¢, cogeneration of heat and power often 1-5¢, and efficient lights, motors, and other electricity-saving devices under 2¢; and they're all getting cheaper.
... buying nuclear power instead makes global warming worse. Why? If delivering a new nuclear kWh cost only (say) 6¢, while saving a kWh cost (pessimistically) 3¢, then the 6¢ spent on the nuclear kWh could instead have bought two efficiency kWh.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/11/23/125923/14

His fucking dream house from which he issues oracular nonsense cost damn near a million dollars twenty years ago. In this sense he is the reified example of the "Let-them-eat-cake" type of middle class conceit for which Marie Antoinette lost her head.

Basically his mantra includes the dubious notion that the solution to our consumerist nightmare is to buy more stuff, new stuff, better than the old stuff.

Fuck him.

Most people can't afford Lovins lifestyle.

If his fantasies were really as cheap as he claims, and they're not, they would already be producing energy on an exajoule scale, which they are not. Amory Lovins told us in the 1970's that electrical consumption would not grow, but it more than doubled, he told us nuclear would disappear, but the production doubled, he told us that solar would be a major player, but it has yet to produce 1% of our electricity or a single exajoule worldwide, and so on and so on. Mostly he was wrong. Like George W. Bush, he spins reality, but he has never predicted reality or acknowledged reality.

Still people cite him as a guru. What?!!? Have we lost all respect for rationality and reality?

It is true that solar fuels his temple in the sky, although all that consumerist crap had to be trucked up the mountain to Snowmass, almost certainly burning beaucoup tons of diesel fuels. He doesn't show the trucker's fuel bills on the tour.

By the way, the cheapest busbar power in the United States comes from the Catawba Nuclear station in South Carolina. It's under 2 cents per kilowatt-hour and it operates continuously and it doesn't need batteries. Nuclear power in the United States today prevents the addition of about one billion tons of carbon dioxide per year to the atmosphere. If you find a way to get the other seven billion tons of carbon dioxide without nuclear power, you have less than a decade to produce it. So far the Lovins mantra has produced lots of wind and noise, but very little real energy. Maybe if he put a windmill in front of his mouth, he could help, but as it is, with his wishful thinking, he's hurting.

We don't have all that much time to indulge him or his acolytes. We're all in grave danger. Al Gore's got a film on the subject in fact. It's in theaters now!