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Energy efficiency and renewables beat nuclear on costs

Nuclear Power – Climate Fix or Folly –Treehugger, Rebecca Cole, Rocky Mountain Institute 7 Oct 09

“………….Lovins points out nuclear drawbacks and a better path forward.
Lovins, who for years has argued that nuclear power is an “uncompetitive, unneeded and obsolete” way to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels, again reiterated that efficiency, distributed generation and renewable energy is a better path.

“Nuclear is not a very effective way to save power,” Lovins says. “You save more with wind, or co-generation, or co-generation and recovery. And lots with efficiency.”

Buying new nuclear power instead of implementing efficiency measures, Lovins says, results in “more carbon release than if the same money were spent buying a new coal-fired power plant.”

Rosner, until recently the director of Argonne National Lab, says he and Lovins agree on a number of issues, namely that energy efficiency is the best way to address climate change and energy demand.

“If you want to spend a dollar, and get the greatest bang for your buck out of it, what you want to do is efficiency, period.”…………

Micropower, co-generation (simultaneously producing both electricity and useful heat ), plus distributed renewables such as wind and solar, are already producing more electricity than nuclear worldwide, Lovins says.

“It’s making a sixth of the world’s total electricity, a third of the new electricity and from one-sixth to a half of all electricity in a dozen industrial countries, not including the U.S. where it is at 6 percent.”

If you add that up, he says, it’s obvious that central stations such as nuclear power plants don’t have as much market share because they cost too much and have too much financial risk.

“In 2007, China, Spain and the U.S. each added more wind power than the world added nuclear power,” Lovins says. “And the U.S. added more wind power than we added coal power in the last five years combined.”…………

Government obstacles to progress.
The CEO of California-based PG&E, one of the largest utilities in the U.S, points to government roadblocks as the biggest obstacle to greater use of renewables.

“They are incomprehensible,” Darbee says. “And so it is taking eight years to bring a clean renewable project to market. Government has to get out of the way and start helping.”………… The bottom line, Lovins says, is to take the economics seriously “and do the cheapest things first.” http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/10/nuclear-power-climate-fix-folly.php

October 8, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, business and costs, climate change | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, uranium