I think operators have to remain hundreds of feet away from the outside of the building, so snaking is not really an option. Anything has to be full-on remote control.

It looks like there’s a concise (and to the extent I can verify from memory, accurate) summary of Lovelock’s nuclear power argument from the book on an (ideologically icky) blog here: James Lovelock’s Book Trashes Renewables, Endorses Nuclear Energy, if anyone is interested in some additional detail on what he says in the book.

‘It’s clean, it’s safe and it’s economical’– the trifecta of delusions most often repeated about nukes (well, those on the industry payroll know these are falsehoods, which would mean the ‘clean, safe, economical’ mantra is simply lying, but whatever keeps the greenbacks flowing, that’s what I say).

(from: http://earthtrack.net/files/uploaded_files/nuclear%20subsidies_report.pdf)

“Our low-end estimate for subsidies to existing reactors (in this case, investor-owned facilities)is 0.7 ¢/kWh, a figure that may seem relatively small at only 13 percent of the value of the power produced. However, it represents more than 35 percent of the nuclear production costs (operation and maintenance costs plus fuel costs, without capital recovery) often cited by the industryâ??s main trade association as a core indicator of nuclear powerâ??s competitiveness; it also represents nearly 80 percent of the production-cost advantage of nuclear relative to coal. With ongoing subsidies to POUs nearly double those to IOUs, the impact on competitive viability is proportionally higher for publicly owned plants…

as Figure ES-1 (p. 2)shows, subsidies to the nuclear fuel cycle have often exceeded the value of the power produced. This means that buying power on the open market and giving it away for free would have been less costly than subsidizing the construction and operation of nuclear power plants.”

(from: http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0810/full/climate.2008.99.html)

“According to Sovacool’s analysis, nuclear power, at 66 gCO2e/kWh emissions is well below scrubbed coal-fired plants, which emit 960 gCO2e/kWh, and natural gas-fired plants, at 443 gCO2e/kWh. However, nuclear emits twice as much carbon as solar photovoltaic, at 32 gCO2e/kWh, and six times as much as onshore wind farms, at 10 gCO2e/kWh. “A number in the 60s puts it well below natural gas, oil, coal and even clean-coal technologies. On the other hand, things like energy efficiency, and some of the cheaper renewables are a factor of six better. So for every dollar you spend on nuclear, you could have saved five or six times as much carbon with efficiency, or wind farms,” Sovacool says. Add to that the high costs and long lead times for building a nuclear plant about $3 billion for a 1,000 megawatt plant, with planning, licensing and construction times of about 10 years and nuclear power is even less appealing…

Thomas Cochran, a nuclear physicist and senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental group in Washington DC, says that although nuclear power has relatively low carbon emissions, it should not be subsidized by governments in the name of combating global warming. He argues that the expense and risk of building nuclear plants makes them uneconomic without large government subsidies, and that similar investment in wind and solar photovoltaic power would pay off sooner. “There are appropriate roles for federal subsidies in energy technologies,” he says. “We subsidized heavily nuclear power when it was an emerging technology 30, 40, 50 years ago. Now it’s a mature technology.”

Nevertheless, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 saw the US Congress offer billions of dollars in tax breaks and loan guarantees in an attempt to kickstart construction. Although a number of utilities are pursuing licences for a total of 30 new nuclear plants in the United States, none have been approved yet. Even assuming that new subsidies were to increase US nuclear power by 1.5 times the current capacity, the result would be only an additional 510 megawatts per year from now until the year 2021. Wind power, the NRDC estimates, provides more than 1,000 megawatts a year, and that figure is likely to increase.”

********
Man, oh man, if only renewables could get the sweet deals nukes get, we’d have photovotaics on every roof, and get paid to do it:

(from:http://www.earthtrack.net/files/uploaded_files/Nuclear%20Tax%20Subsidies%20in%20APA_June%202010.pdf)

Even the low subsidy estimate for comparing K-L to current law shows a subsidy of 0.3 c/kWh over the 40 year service life of the reactor. This is three times the total payments the industry (albeit through a ratepayer surcharge) incurs to shift all long-term responsibility for high level nuclear wastes to the taxpayer. Higher estimates show benefits in excess of 1.5 c/kWh, enough to distort the economics between competing energy options.

â?¢ Accelerated depreciation rules for nuclear reactors would become a key element of their competitive advantage in power markets. Comparing depreciation schedules under K-L to more realistic matching of depreciation with asset service life further illustrates how important rapid write-off of capital investments are to the industry. Even using the 40-year license life, K-L rules relative to a 40-year straight line depreciation schedule generate $1.2 to $3.1 billion in net present value subsidies per reactor. With higher capital cost assumptions, this translates to subsidies in excess of 3 c/kWh â?? more than half the expected market value of the electricity for 2010-24 under EIAâ??s reference case scenario (EIA, 2010)…

On a net present value basis, the ITC is worth $860 million to $1.1 billion for an AP1000 reactor, and $1.3 to $1.5 billion for an Areva EPR…

Assuming an AP1000 reactor is able to tap into the PTC for all of its kWh generated at an 84.5% capacity factor, the reactor would receive an annual subsidy of $60-104 million per year through the PTC. The comparable value for the Areva EPR would be $85-$144 million. This is equivalent to between 0.7 and 1.2 c/kWh on a levelized cost basis.”

You don’t want to restrict discussions with nuke apologists to reality based arguments, there wouldn’t be any discussions:

(from http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/07/eia-report-renewables-surpass-nuclear-output)

“According to the most recent issue of the “Monthly Energy Review” by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), renewable energy has passed a milestone as domestic production is now greater than that of nuclear power and is closing in on oil.

During the first quarter of 2011, renewable energy sources (biomass/biofuels, geothermal, solar, water, wind) provided 2.245 quadrillion Btus of energy or 11.73 percent of U.S. energy production. More significantly, energy production from renewable energy sources in 2011 was 5.65 percent more than that from nuclear power, which provided 2.125 quadrillion Btus and has remained largely unchanged in recent years. Energy from renewable sources is now 77.15 percent of that from domestic crude oil production, with the gap closing rapidly.

Looking at all energy sectors (e.g., electricity, transportation, thermal), production of renewable energy, including hydropower, has increased by 15.07 percent compared to the first quarter of 2010, and by 25.07 percent when compared to the first quarter of 2009. Among the renewable energy sources, biomass/biofuels accounted for 48.06 percent, hydropower for 35.41 percent, wind for 12.87 percent, geothermal for 2.45 percent, and solar for 1.16 percent.”

(from: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Renewable_energy_statistics)

“Among the Member States, the highest share of renewables in gross final energy consumption in 2009 was recorded in Sweden (47.3 %), while Latvia, Finland and Austria each reported more than a quarter of their final energy consumption derived from renewables. Compared with the most recent data available for 2009, the indicative targets for Denmark, France, Ireland and the United Kingdom require each of these Member States to increase their share of renewables in final energy consumption by at least 10 percentage points…

The latest information available for 2009 (see Figure 2) shows that electricity generated from renewable energy sources contributed 18.2 % of the EU-27â??s gross electricity consumption. In Austria (66.8 %) and Sweden (56.4 %) more than half of all the electricity consumed was generated from renewable energy sources, largely as a result of hydropower and biomass.

The growth in electricity generated from renewable energy sources during the period 1999 to 2009 (see Figure 3) largely reflects an expansion in two renewable energy sources; namely, wind turbines and biomass. Although hydropower remained the single largest source for renewable electricity generation in the EU in 2009, the amount of electricity generated was somewhat lower than a decade earlier (-2.4 %). In contrast, the volume of electricity generated from biomass more than trebled, while that from wind turbines increased more than nine-fold.”

If I’m cleaning my gun, the actual risk of allowing the barrel to point towards various family members is much less than the risk they all have when the get in the car to go see a movie, as I stay home and continue cleaning my guns.

Therefore, I should not bother with where the gun is pointed.

This is an analogy to ignoring the basic problem with nuclear power, which is not radiation or meltdowns. It is the fact that the nuclear power industry is in the business of making safety work just to a certain point, then pushing through their designs and reactors with lies, political power plays, and trickery.

It is simply not possible for a rational person to argue that Fukushima is not a horrible disaster with major consequences negatively affecting people’s lives and well being (and not a figment of a green imagination). Most, maybe all, of what went wrong at Fukushima was avoidable had the industry not acted in the way I describe above.

All they had to do was not point the gun at the other family members.

(The part about cleaning the guns while my family goes to a movie was made up.)

The idea that non-nuclear options don’t provide a significant amount of energy, are not available, and don’t scale up is an utter fiction.

The book was written well before Fukushima, but based on what Lovelock writes, I assume he would make the case that the risks represented by things like Fukushima-style reactor failures are dwarfed by the sorts of risks represented by committing to any of the available non-nuclear options for transitioning away from fossil fuels, since only nuclear fission possesses the crucial combination of being 1) currently available, 2) non-greenhouse-gas emitting, and 3) able to scale to the level needed to replace fossil fuels.