oday we feature an interview with Amory Lovins, preeminent environmental thinker and co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute. With forty years of energy policy experience, Amory Lovins has dedicated himself to the idea that our energy future does not have to look like our energy past. Listen in as Arnie and Amory discuss transitioning towards a clean energy economy in the US and around the world.
The Road Less Taken: Energy Choices for the Future
AL: Quite a few nuclear plants are starting to shut down because they, too, are uneconomic to operate. They cant compete with the wholesale power price and thats regardless of what they may have cost to build originally. Because that cost is already sunk and you cant un-spend it. And anyway, its probably paid off by now because the plants are old. And I just wrote a piece in the April, 2013, The Atomic Scientist about the economics of U.S. nuclear phase-out, and were in one. Its kind of in slow motion but any nuclear plant that has big repair bills like Crystal River or San Onofre stands a good chance of shutting down, and its kind of like having the engine blow up in your car and its an old car and youve got to figure out, is it worth putting in a whole new engine and betting that something else important isnt going to break during the time you wanted to get the benefit out of the new engine. And its a pretty hard bet to make because as these plants get old, stuff starts to wear out, you get fatigue and corrosion and all kinds of age-dependent effects, there has been a very rapid escalation in the real cost of big maintenance jobs on these plants, what are called net capital additions, because theyre actually added to the capital cost rather than expensed. And the industry has been pretty careful not to find out whether that escalation is mostly for upgrading to produce more power -- whether its a productive investment -- or whether its more and more big repairs caused by aging effects. That would be very bad news for those who have just gotten their licenses extended or are about to, to go into 20 years of overtime, because it would mean that your license lets you run the plant, but its not worth continuing to fix it. And I think there is some evidence emerging that for many plants, that will be the case.
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Renewable Energy
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