Over the years, I've been more and more inclined to express contempt for the antinuclear oracle at Snowmass, the MacArthur "genius" Amory Lovins. In his privy little McMansion with a 900 square foot greenhouse where he grows bananas, just like you and me, a totally solar powered McMansion just down the road from the ski runs at Aspen, Lovins makes predictions like the one I am now about to produce from the Summer of 1980 issue of the social science journal Foreign Affairs. To wit:
Our thesis rests on a different perception. Our attempt to rethink focuses not on marginal reforms but on basic assumptions. In fact, the global nuclear power enterprise is rapidly disappearing......For fundamental reasons which we shall describe, nuclear power is not commercially viable, and questions of how to regulate an inexorably expanding world nuclear regime are moot.
You really should check this one out, with its "Nuclear power only works in communist countries like France," rhetoric. Remember folks this particular bit of "genius" dates from 1980.
De facto moratoria on reactor ordering exist today in the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, and probably the United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan and Canada. Nuclear power has been indefinitely deferred or abandoned in Austria, Denmark, Norway, Iran, China, Australia and New Zealand...
The full article can be accessed with a subscription here.
1980.
1980.
One other gem from the 1980 article is this one:
Erratic reactor performance—poor reliability, cracks in key components, maintenance problems seeming to go with scarcely a pause from the pediatric to the geriatric—has afflicted most countries.
I'm enjoying this so much, I just have to add another:
Far from being uselessly slow, efficiency improvements are the
fastest growing energy source today. Of all new energy "supplies" to the nine EEC countries during 1973-78, about 95 percent came from more efficient use and only 5 percent from all supply expansions combined, including North Sea oil and nuclear power—a ratio of about 19 to 1 in favor of conservation. In Japan, the corresponding ratio rose to about 10. In the United States, it averaged about 2.5; but in 1979, real GNP rose 2.3 percent while total energy use declined 0.2 percent—remarkable progress in view of the more than $100 billion in annual tax and price subsidies which underprice fuels and power by more than a third.
Thus spake the "genius" in 1980.
As it happens, most EIA tables begin to collect data in 1980.
The "dying" nuclear industry:
World Nuclear Production, 1980-2004.
In 1980 it produced 684 billion kilowatt-hours and 24 years after the "genius" predicted its immanent death (except in communist countries like France) it was producing 2,620 billion kilowatt-hours or 383 percent of what it was.
Here's the important point: The increases took place in spite of the continuous bitching of "geniuses" like Lovins.
Lovins main argument in this piece of 1980's balderdash is that the use of plutonium in nuclear power reactors would inevitably lead to nuclear war and nuclear weapons proliferation.
Here are some countries that use plutonium in their nuclear reactors as of 2007: Belgium, France, Japan, Switzerland and Germany.
Here is the number of nuclear wars in which these countries have participated: 1 (Japan, as a victim, well before it began using plutonium in its reactors.) In fact, despite Lovins dire predictions in 1980, the total number of nuclear wars remains zero. The total number of dangerous fossil fuel wars is not zero.
Some death. It reminds me of the death of everyone in Japan from the earthquake at the nuclear facility about which there was so much international excitement.
Recently, I started off one of my diaries, which was, unsurprisingly, on the the death of everyone in Japan after an earthquake that shook a nuclear plant - almost all of my diaries are about nuclear energy - with an out of context quotation from my favorite poem.
Over the years, although I've spent a lot of time listening third hand to drivel that had, as it's ultimate source, the utterances of the "oracle at Snowmass" who, in his McMansion in the clouds, couldn't care less about the status of people who do not grow bananas for sport or to make an esoteric point in Colorado, people who live, for instance, in places like, say, Bangladesh, or Vanuatu who live on bananas for real.
In 1976 the "paper" that made Amory Lovins famous was published, also in Foreign Affairs which was not back then, and is not now, a physics journal. The title of the paper was "The Road Not Taken." Until I looked the damn thing up and decided to read the original, I had no idea that Amory Lovins became famous for a shit-for-brains paper that started with a poem, this one the now trite but once brilliant Robert Frost poem about the fork in the woods.
I swear I didn't know that Lovins did that.
The shit-for-brains paper is about the energy path that the United States should choose "for the next fifty years." Of course, 31 of those 50 years have now passed and 30 years of something called experience has in no way caused Lovins to change his tune. In 1976, he couldn't have cared less whether the Chinese or Indians would agree to remain impoverished for instance, and in 2007, 31 years later he is spectacularly uninterested in them, just as he is uninterested in the people of Angola and whether they agree to remain impoverished so he can grow bananas up in Snowmass.
Here are some wonderful excerpts of the "genius" paper of 1976:
People do not want electricity or oil, nor such economic abstractions as "residential services," but rather comfortable rooms, light, vehicular motion, food, tables, and other real things. Such end-use needs can be classified by the physical nature of the task to be done. In the United States today, about 58 percent of all energy at the point of end use is required as heat, split roughly equally between temperatures above and below the boiling point of water. (In Western Europe the low-temperature heat alone is often a half of all end use energy.)
...and...
...It is not surprising that at least one foreign car maker hopes to go into the wind-machine and heat-pump business. Such a market can be entered incrementally,without the billions of dollars' investment required for, say, liquefying natural gas or gasifying coal...
(Remember, this isn't some 2007 remark, but is a 1976 remark.)
For example, the medium scale of urban neighborhoods and rural villages offers fine prospects for solar collectors—especially for adding collectors to existing buildings of which some (perhaps with large flat roofs) can take excess collector area while others cannot take any. They could be joined via communal heat storage systems, saving on labor cost and on heat losses.
I know what comes next. "It's all Ronald Reagan's fault..."
Actually though, just like Dick Cheney doesn't rule Indonesia and thus has no authority to cause a worldwide interest in nuclear energy (about which he couldn't actually care less), Ronald Reagan never actually controlled Japan, or Germany, or Argentina, or Switzerland or Lichtenstein. Thus if the "solar collectors on the roof idea" was a physical principle of economic and technical merit, one might wonder why it is not a widespread practice in say, Germany. After all, when Pope Urban VIII declared that Galileo's ideas about planetary motion were to be not only unfunded but banned, it had no effect whatsoever on the development of mechanics, although it did have the effect of moving mechanics research from Italian to German and English speaking countries.
If the idea advanced by Lovins in his 1976 paper that
...ingenious ways of backfitting existing urban and rural buildings (even large commercial ones) or their neighborhoods with efficient and exceedingly reliable solar collectors are being rapidly developed in both the private and public sectors. In some recent projects, the lead time from ordering to operation has been only a few months...
...surely the idea would have caught hold during the Carter administration. No?
Secondly, exciting developments in the conversion of agricultural, forestry and urban wastes to methanol and other liquid and gaseous fuels now offer practical, economically interesting technologies sufficient to run an efficient U.S. transport sector.''' Some bacterial and enzymatic routes under study look even more promising, but presently proved processes already offer sizable contributions without the inevitable climatic constraints of fossil-fuel combustion.
(The bold is mine.)
1976.
1976.
1976.
Energy storage is often said to be a major problem of energy-income technologies. But this ''problem" is largely an artifact of trying to recentralize, upgrade and redistribute inherently diffuse energy flows. Directly storing sunlight or wind—or, for that matter, electricity from any source— is indeed difficult on a large scale. But it is easy if done on a scale and in an energy quality matched to most end-use needs. Daily, even seasonal, storage of low- and medium-temperature heat at the point of use is straightforward with water tanks, rock beds, or perhaps fusible salts. Neighborhood heat storage is even cheaper. In industry, wind-generated compressed air can easily (and, with due care, safely) be stored to operate machinery: the technology is simple,
cheap, reliable and highly developed.
And so on...
In fact, it doesn't matter what other claptrap Lovins produced in the last 31 years of incessant babbling, much of which consisted of "genius" rhetoric about how he can't stand nuclear energy.
At this point, it thought it useful to point out that none of this rhetoric without substance is new.
Before leaving in disgust and a feeling of hopelessness that we still cannot substitute reality for statements of wishful thinking a platitudes, I want to say one more thing. I've heard this "efficiency is the biggest source of new energy" blabber here recently, and as usual, it was attached to all sorts of economic data attached nebulously to GDP figures and the like. It was nonsense, of course, since the GDP depends very much on consumption including the "all new stuff" subheading called "all new more efficient" stuff.
Efficiency, despite Lovins three decade old blather about how efficiency had saved the day in the 1970's, is nebulous. It is not something that is easily measured. If I have an efficient toaster, for instance, but I have also bought and electric massage chair, it is difficult for anyone outside my home to know if I am saving any energy. The only thing they can see is how much energy I use. If my massage chair consumes more energy than is saved by my efficient toaster, my energy use will go up. If not, my energy use will either stay the same or go down.
As for how electricity is used, there has been some investigation of that too and it has no relationship whatsoever to whatever the hell Lovins was trying to so say with all that nonsense about temperatures and energy.
No, it's not all about your refrigerator.
The point is that probably the only useful measure is my personal efficiency, how much energy I, as a person, use. Thus, in spite of Lovins' claims about how much energy "efficiency" had saved in the 1970's, he offers no metric to support the claim. Probably no metric existed, in fact, and he just made it up.
The best metric we actually have is per capita consumption.
The numbers speak for themselves.
It has not changed much, except in poor countries about which Lovins couldn't care less.
I did the calculation of the ratio of per capita energy consumption in every region recorded by the EIA. The figure for entire planet is that per capita energy consumption of energy rose by 9%, to 109% of what it was in 2007.
Yeah right, conservation and efficiency is working just great!
Now, for the regions, and please try to think about poverty when you look at these numbers:
North America: 97.9% of 1980 of per capita energy usage.
Central and South America: 128% of 1980 per capita energy usage.
Europe: 107.9% of 1980 per capita energy usage.
Eurasia (former USSR countries): 89.4% of per capita energy usage.
Middle East: 186.3% of per capita energy usage.
Africa: 109.1% of per capita energy usage.
Asia: 194.0% of per capita energy usage.
If you believe these numbers support the notion that efficiency is a great big deal, I have a hydrogen SUV I'd like to sell you.
Now let's turn to the blabber about nuclear energy and Japan that Lovins was babbling incoherently about in 1980:
In 1980, Lovins blabbed on and on and on and on about how nuclear energy could not forestall Japan increasing its fossil fuel demand by 2/3 even if it increased nuclear power by a factor of 18.
From 1980 to 2004, Japan's reliance on natural gas rose by 333%.
World natural gas consumption, including Japanese consumption.
Japan's oil imports, not connected much to electricity, have stayed pretty much constant, 1992-2006.
It's reliance on coal rose by 226% in the same period.
World Coal Consumption, including Japan
Interestingly Japan's use of renewable energy rose by 1375% but did little to arrest the use of coal and natural gas. By Lovinsian logic, Japan should not have tried to use renewables since they can't seem to do much to arrest dependence on dangerous fossil fuels.
World renewable energy consumption, including Japan.
What gives? Well, "percentage" talk, especially that used by the likes of Lovins is in fact misleading. (I am deliberately playing with it here.)
Here is the amount of electricity that Japan produces pretty much with dangerous coal and dangerous natural gas with a dollop of dangerous oil thrown in:
World Conventional Thermal Electricity Generation, including Japan.
Looking at these numbers and the "1375%" increase in renewable energy in Japanese renewable energy, we see that renewables are still trivial in Japan, not even managing 2% of Japan's thermal electric output.
By contrast, nuclear energy, the world's largest climate change free form of energy by far, produced 46% as much electricity as was produced by thermal means (the burning dangerous fossil fuels portion) in Japan. Still, in the Lovinsian alternate universe, renewables are a success and nuclear is a failure.
As linked above, Japan's nuclear generation, "only" increased by 345%, not the 1800% that Lovins was so "worried" about. In any case, events have shown that the increases observed have little connection to Lovins' soothsaying in 1980. Note that Lovins was predicting the death of nuclear energy in Japan, not a 345% increase.
What matters to humanity 31 years after Lovins type babble became fashionable is that the use of dangerous fossil fuels and the unrestricted release of dangerous fossil fuel waste was not checked in Japan, and Amory Lovins couldn't care less. In fact - compared with the actual result - rising by just 2/3 would have been a victory for all mankind effected by climate change, but Amory Lovins couldn't care less. He also couldn't care less about that part of humanity that is facing submersion, poor countries like Bangladesh, and rich countries like the Netherlands. He's moved on to better and bigger things in the big old McMansion in the clouds. He lives His McMansion is 2 and a half kilometers above the current level of the sea. While he grows bananas in his 900 sq ft Greenhouse, people in Vanuatu surrender the banana plantations that fed them to the salty sea.
(Hey Vanuatu had a major earthquake this week. Maybe if they built a nuclear power plant, the world would actually give a rat's ass.)
Lovins couldn't care less about the half a trillion tons of the dangerous fossil fuel waste dumped into the atmosphere around the world while he was hoping against hope that nuclear would fail on the grounds that it made nuclear war (in his imagination anyway) inevitable.
He also couldn't care less that world energy demand has increased by 157% while he was blabbing about hydrogen hyper cars.
I always say, "If you don't know what you're talking about, make stuff up."