Amory Lovins on why Ontario should avoid nukes
Jordan Gold has a great Q&A in Corporate Knights magazine with energy expert Amory Lovins, who goes into great detail explaining why Ontario — or any jurisdiction for that matter — should avoid committing itself to nuclear power plants. Among the several interesting comments from Lovins: “I think the saviour of the Ontario electric system is likely to be the private capital market, which will wisely decline to put its money where the government’s mouth is.”
Lovins says micropower — combined heat and power plants and distributed renewables — is a better bet than nuclear and has the backing of the private markets. He adds that micropower is more reliable, resilient, politically acceptable, costs less and has lower financial risk. “The only market actors professing any enthusiasm for new nuclear build are those who get transactional rewards—but none of those who would put their own capital at risk,” says Lovins. “Nuclear power has died of an incurable attack of market forces and is way beyond any hope of revival, because the competitors are severalfold cheaper and are getting rapidly more so.”
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca