Amory Lovins: Capital markets had already fled from nuclear

(eceee news, 24 Mar 2016) Letter from Amory Lovins in Financial Times on the demise of nuclear power. Capital markets had already fled from nuclear power before the large accidents.

Sir, New nuclear reactors have no business case, even if not of the ill-starred French variety. Yet you repeat the nuclear industry’s myth that ascribes its slow death instead to Jane Fonda’s 1979 film The China Syndrome and the Three Mile Island accident of March 28 1979 (“ Reactor safety carries its own dangers for EDF ”, March 21).

Three months earlier, on Christmas Day 1978, Business Week’s scathing 10-page cover story described how nuclear power’s US sales had collapsed — and it faced in Europe and Japan “the most serious crisis in its 30-year history” — for lack of a market. US orders had plummeted from 41 in 1973 to zero in 1978; 40 per cent of their cancellations occurred before 1979, leaving many others teetering on the brink and cancelled soon thereafter. Similarly, orders in the past decade so dwindled that global nuclear capacity shrank in two of the three years before the Fukushima disaster.

The nuclear industry blames Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima for scaring off the public. But capital markets had already fled to better returns and lower risks in renewable competitors that got $380bn of investment last year (more than 10 times nuclear’s), produce more electricity, and enjoy public enthusiasm. Any remaining pockets of nuclear enthusiasm rely on theology not economics and on conscripted not voluntary investment.

Prof Amory B Lovins
Cofounder and Chief Scientist,
Rocky Mountain Institute,
Basalt, CO, US

Published in Financial Times, letters, 22 March 2016