Amory Lovins: Learning from Japan's Nuclear Disaster

This is an anti-nuclear/pro-renewables article that makes an economic argument against slow, expensive and dangerous nuclear technology. Lovins argues that:

"Nuclear power is the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away; the only one whose ingredients can help make and hide nuclear bombs; the only climate solution that substitutes proliferation, accident, and high-level radioactive waste dangers. Indeed, nuclear plants are so slow and costly to build that they reduce and retard climate protection.

Here's how. Each dollar spent on a new reactor buys about two to ten times less carbon savings and is 20 to 40 times slower, than spending that dollar on the cheaper, faster, safer solutions that make nuclear power unnecessary and uneconomic: efficient use of electricity, making heat and power together in factories or buildings ("cogeneration"), and renewable energy. The last two made 18 percent of the world's 2009 electricity (while nuclear made 13 percent, reversing their 2000 shares)—and made over 90 percent of the 2007 to 2008 increase in global electricity production."

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/print/guest-post-learning-from-japans-nuclear-disaster/