The Plowboy Interview with Amory Lovins
(Page 13 of 15)
November/December 1977
By the Mother Earth News editors
What the Carter plan does do is give a boost to several of the things that compete with nuclear power, such as conservation, coal, cogeneration, utility rate reform, and capital transfer schemes. Any one of these five isin my opinion— sufficient to finish off the nuclear industry.
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PLOWBOY: I take it then, you feel nuclear power in the U.S. is facing some rough times ahead.
LOVINS: Oh, it's dead. It's dead.
PLOWBOY: You mean it's finished, as of right now, late 1977?
LOVINS: It's dead in the sense of a brontosaurus that's had its spinal cord cut and—because it's so enormous and has all these ganglia near the tail —can keep thrashing around for years not knowing it's dead yet. Two things killed it: One is basic economics. The nuclear industry has only survived so far because it's been assiduously nourished by various subsidies and bailouts. Those are gradually coming to an end. The other thing that's killed it is its own zealous promoters, who never quite understood the gist of Dick Crossman's first rule of successful propaganda ... namely, that the basis for it is truth.
PLOWBOY: What was that name again?
LOVINS: Richard Crossman. He ran the British propaganda campaign during the war and he's always pointed out that propaganda won't persuade anyone unless it's basically true. When the history of this period comes to be written, I think that the people who now consider themselves the foremost advocates of nuclear power will seem to be the people who did it in politically.
PLOWBOY: How is nuclear energy doing right now in the rest of the world?
LOVINS: Much the same as in the U.S. The Japanese industry has completely lost its shirt. The German nuclear industry has been retrenching and is still losing money. The French industry is an arm of the government, so it draws on the treasury ... but otherwise it loses money. The Canadian industry has apparently been losing money. It's hard to tell exactly about the home market ... but certainly on their exports, the Canadians have been losing money. They've been paying their customers to haul the reactors away.
PLOWBOY: You know, all this is kind of funny, because it wasn't so long ago that our energy leaders were pointing at atomic fission as the panacea that would—in a couple of decades— solve all our energy worries forever.
LOVINS: Yes. And now it seems that many people have begun to say the same sorts of things about nuclear fusion. The people who are always saying "something will come along to save us" are now pointing to fusion.
PLOWBOY: What do you think of fusion's potential?
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