Don't Drink the Nuclear Kool-Aid. By Amy Goodman, TruthDig.com, July 16, 2008. "Nuclear power is not a solution to climate change... Amory Lovins is the co-founder and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado. He makes simple, powerful points... 'The nuclear revival that we often hear about is not actually happening. It is a very carefully fabricated illusion ... there are no buyers. Wall Street is not putting a penny of private capital into the industry, despite 100-plus percent subsidies.' He adds: 'Basically, we can have as many nuclear plants as Congress can force the taxpayers to pay for. But you won't get any in a market economy.' Even if nuclear power were economically viable, Lovins continues, 'the first issue to come up for me would be the spread of nuclear weapons, which it greatly facilitates'... Then there is the waste... 'So far,' [Lovins says,] 'all the places we've looked [at to store it] turned out to be geologically unsuitable, including Yucca Mountain.' [McCain and Obama] are wrong [to support] nuclear power... Lovins summarizes: 'One of the big reasons we have an oil problem and a climate problem today is we spent our money on the wrong stuff. If we had spent it on efficiency and renewables, those problems would've gone away, and we would've made trillions of dollars' profit on the deal because it's so much cheaper to save energy than to supply it.' The answer is blowing in the wind." Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a daily international TV and radio news hour. [See the Rocky Mountain Institute's site for a full text of Goodman's interview with Lovins.]
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