The critical energy debate

Sanders, Scott

BOOKS The critical energy debate ENERGY/WAR: BREAKING THE NUCLEAR LINK by Amory B. and L. Hunter Lovins Friends of the Earth. 161 pp. $10. Scott Sanders How we acquire energy— whether from...

...The technicians, machines, installations, and materials used to generate electricity through nuclear fission can be used to build bombs, and have been, notably in India and very largely in Israel and South Africa...
...For example, increases in industrial energy efficiency from 1973 to 1978 "yielded twice the 'supply' of Alaskan oil, but left the oil in the ground...
...I Its worldwide application is the main driving force behind the proliferation of nuclear weapons...
...Energy/War depicts the civilian nuclear industry as a comatose victim of its own inherent flaws, kept feebly alive by transfusions of public money...
...Increases in automobile efficiency have already saved more oil than have all operating reactors...
...What kinds of energy do we need, and for what purposes will we use them...
...f It threatens national security, not only through the proliferation of weapons but by providing targets for sabotage...
...But the Lovinses show convincingly that such a separation is impossible...
...II It subverts democracy by requiring a highly centralized pattern of investment, decision-making, and police authority...
...Yes, Lovins argued with formidable technical detail in Soft Energy Paths (Friends of the Earth, 1977...
...The soft path can lead us out of our energy predicament, Lovins maintains, but only if we invest our intelligence and wealth in that venture, rather than in the hard path...
...He outlined the case against nuclear power in the last chapter of Soft Energy Paths, and he and his wife, L. Hunter Lovins, have argued the case exhaustively in their new study, Energy/War: Breaking the Nuclear Link...
...With a text written for general readers, and 350 footnotes written for technicians, the book mounts five principal objections against nuclear power: H It is uneconomic by comparison with virtually all other energy sources...
...Although nuclear apologists and oil moguls dispute his findings, recent trends in American energy-use are confirming his soft-path analysis...
...Scott Sanders How we acquire energy— whether from photovoltaic cells or breeder reactors, for example—is partly a question of engineering, partly of economics, but mainly of politics and values...
...Soft energy paths stress conservation, the use of renewable resources, decentralized control, accessible and environmentally benign technology, long-term planning for sustainability, Scott Sanders, a novelist and essayist, teaches at Indiana University...
...Energy/War deals cogently in both data and values, in costaccounting and politics...
...How will our energy choices shape our society, and how will they influence the lives of people elsewhere...
...and modest capital investment...
...Can the sun and conservation really spare us from freezing in the dark...
...Even if it could be divorced from weapons, civilian nuclear technology would still be irrelevant to our energy predicament, for it produces electricity, of which we now have much more than we can use efficiently (American electrical utilities show an overcapacity of about 40 per cent, and the figure is growing as new plants are brought on line), and it saves us very little petroleum, since only a small percentage of electricity is generated with oil...
...Strip-mining coal to make synthetic liquid fuels, drilling for oil offshore and then piping it across a continent, cracking atoms for electrifying billboards and toothbrushes: These are typical hard-path enterprises...
...11t is "the least effective known way to replace oil...
...So long as the United States continues to sell or give reactors and fuel to other countries—and our clients include Argentina, Brazil, Iran, South Africa, South Korea, Pakistan, and Taiwan, among others—weapons proliferation will continue...
...The debate is critical in the double sense that it is self-sustaining, like a chain reaction, and that our energy future as well as the future peace of our planet rest upon the outcome...
...The "Atoms for Peace" ideal, enunciated by President Eisenhower in 1954, sought to erect a barrier between civilian and military uses of nuclear technology...
...It speaks with a voice of reason and humanity in the nuclear debate, which, as the authors remark, "has .. . gone critical, like the Vietnam war in 1969-1970, a delayed reaction to a technology imposed on a public that did not demand it by technocrats whose psychological needs did...
...No one has articulated these questions more forcefully, or offered more enlightened answers, than Amory Lovins, a young American physicist who represents Friends of the Earth in England...
...The latter is characterized by a stress on energy and consumption, the use of nonrenewable fuels, centralized control, complex and frequently dangerous technology, short-term planning, and massive capital investment...
...The entire book illustrates what Amory Lovins observed in Soft Energy Paths: "The most important, difficult, and neglected questions of energy strategy are not mainly technical or economic, but rather social and ethical...
...Together with scientists from around the world he has extended that argument in the bimonthly journal, Soft Energy Notes (available from IPSEP, 124 Spear Street, San Francisco, CA 94105...
...foreign policy...
...We cannot continue to devote half of our Federal energy research funds, as we now , do, to nuclear research, nor to spend tens of billions of dollars on synfuel development, if we hope to build a bridge to a solar future before the oil runs out...
...Attic insulation, homemade methane generators, windmills, and carpools are typical of the soft path...
...On the other hand, without the cloak of civilian reactors, acquiring the materials and equipment necessary for making bombs would be much more difficult, and it would be "unambiguously military in intent...
...Well and good, the skeptic responds, I'm all for benign energy policies...
...Even if the Lovinses are right—and I am persuaded they are—the transfusions will not cease so long as corporate executives and their fellow-travelers occupy the regulatory agencies, the Cabinet, and the White House, or so long as nuclear bombs, which hatch in the same incubators as nuclear electricity, are regarded as the chief instruments of U.S...
...Since the mid-1970s he has been distinguishing between what he calls "soft" and "hard" energy paths...
...What costs, in money and environment, are we willing to pay...
...But can this energy scenario really work...
...The nuclear industry now provides, the Lovinses estimate, about half as much energy in this country as firewood does...
...While there are problems with all the hard-path technologies from oil tankers to stripmines, none, according to Lovins, is nearly so hazardous or wrong-headed as the use of nuclear reactors to generate electricity...
...The Lovinses might have added the objection that the nuclear enterprise subjects us all to the threat of radiation at every step, from mines to waste dumps...
...Mobil and Exxon will gladly supply you with further illustrations...

Vol. 45 • June 1981 • No. 6


 
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