recently concluded with Georgia Power Company confirms SRC is thus an environmentally class solid fuel that [Whereupon, at 12:45 p.m., the subcommittee adjourned, to reconvene at 2 p.m., Wednesday, September 21, 1977.] NUCLEAR POWER COSTS (Part 2) WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1977 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, AND NATURAL RESOURCES SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS, Washington, D.C. The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:25 p.m., in room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Leo J. Ryan (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Present: Representatives Leo J. Ryan, Robert F. Drinan, Thomas N. Kindness, Arlan Stangeland, and John E. (Jack) Cunningham. Also present: Norman G. Cornish, staff director; David A. Schuenke, counsel; Dan Cook, chief investigator; Helen Drusine, assistant for energy; Ronald J. Tipton, assistant for environment; Geraldine A. Fitzgerald, staff member; and Charles O. Campbell, minority professional staff, Committee on Government Operations. Mr. RYAN. The subcommittee will come to order. I apologize for starting late. But for those of you who have followed the legislative vagaries of this place, we are dealing with ERDA policy matters for this year. This particular amendment had to do with increasing the funds available for solar energy research. It is a matter of important policy, so I stayed on the floor until the vote was taken. It was either that or come over here and go back. That would have taken more time. We will begin then a little bit late. Today we turn our attention to energy conservation as an alternative to nuclear power. This spring we took the subcommittee to consider some European experiences because I believe Europe is ahead of this country in the conservation of energy. Were we even to approach the efficiency of some countries of Europe, we could save millions of barrels of oil per day and have a much lesser dependence upon Arab oil than we do now. We want to talk this afternoon about reusing-which includes for example, the use of industrial steam, or what is called industrial cogeneration. There is also the recycling of waste which we have touched on several times during these hearings. The California Energy Commission has found that the potential for industrial cogeneration in that State alone could be as much as 6,700 megawatts by 1985. (1063) So, you see that conservation is not just obeying the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit. It, in many ways, makes that speed limit, I believe, more of a cosmetic than a reality. Our first panel will consist of Mr. Amory Lovins, a consultant to numerous national and international agencies, and a controversial figure in the energy debate. He is so controversial, in fact, that a book of 10 essays criticizing him has been published and read into the Congressional Record. I can think of no higher commendation than to have that kind of attention paid. Ian Forbes, author of one of those essays, will share the panel with him. That is exactly what we are after today. We want to know both ends of the spectrum. We want to hear the sharp division, debate, and criticism in order to give all the members of the subcommitte a chance to form their own opinions. We would like to invite them as our first two witnesses. Do you solemnly swear the testimony you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? [Chorus of "I do's."] Mr. RYAN. Mr. Lovins, would you lead off, please? STATEMENT OF AMORY B. LOVINS, CONSULTANT PHYSICIST, BRITISH REPRESENTATIVE, FRIENDS OF THE EARTH Mr. LOVINS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is my considered judgment that nuclear power is dead-in the sense of a brontosaurus that has had its spinal cord cut, but because it is so big, and has all those ganglia near the tail someplace, can keep thrashing around for years not knowing it is dead yet. When a brontosaurus has just died in your backyard, it is important to recognize that fact and to bury the carcass as quickly as possible without ceremony. But a little post mortem first may provide information useful to other people who keep brontosauri or other large beasts and who are solicitous or apprehensive about their health. In these brief remarks I shall, therefore, suggest why the death of this particular brontosaurus was inevitable and, if we learn from it, can greatly improve our energy policy. The nuclear dream never did make much sense. For example, to supply by nuclear power a mere quarter of officially projected energy needs in the year 2000, we would need to order a new 1,000-megawatt reactor every 4.7 days starting today. This would require at least $130 billion in capital investment per year-I refer you to note No. 2-or approximately the present total rate of investment in new plants in all U.S. industry. In the longer run, if total U.S. energy at the point of end use grew by only 1 percent per year after 1985, and delivered electricity by only 2 percent per year-both less than half official projections and if nuclear power grew until it supplied 70 percent of all electricity-I refer you to note No. 3-then in the year 2025 we would still be burning fossil fuels more than half again as fast as we do now. Obviously even a very ambitious nuclear program cannot substitute significantly for oil and gas before they become scarce. Such ambitious figures, however, cannot be achieved; nuclear power is proving a flash in the pan. Official projections of how much nuclear capacity the United States would have installed in the year 2000 have been failing rapidly since 1973, as shown in figure 1. Mr. RYAN. Without objection, that will be inserted into the record at this point. Mr. LOVINS. If recent trends continue, the curve will hit zero next year. I think it will, in fact, come to rest somewhere between zero-if we phase out existing plants and those now under construction-and slightly over 100 gigawatts, or less than 3 percent of our present total energy use, if we do not. Thus, nuclear power might, at most, be in the same league as firewood. The more than tenfold decline in nuclear expectations is due to straight forward market forces: As Adam Smith might have said, the invisible fist strikes again. The national energy plan does nothing to oppose these forces and much to encourage them. It does not bail out the nuclear industry with the approximately $100 billion needed to resuscitate it; on the contrary, it emphasizes conservation, cogeneration, coal conversion, and utility rate reform, any one of which would administer the coup de grace. Even before the national energy plan, the rate of domestic nuclear orders, net of cancellations, was approximately zero for several yearsI refer you to note No. 6 It showed every sign of continuing that way indefinitely. A senior administration official stated last month that gross domestic nuclear orders, if any, over the next 5 years would probably not exceed five and that the industry was, therefore, at a dead end. Apparently all reactor vendors, here and abroad, are losing their shirts: 21-322 (Pt. 2) O 787 Their cumulative losses are probably several billion dollars, and rising. The vendors are staying in business only by supplementing back orders with exports paid for by the Export-Import Bank and similar bodiesa convenient way of subsidizing ailing private cash flows from the public till. I suspect that this largesse and the roughly 20 percent taxpayer subsidy we give to every new domestic power station-may soon come to an end. I have already mentioned why nuclear power cannot help significantly with our energy problems: A reactor ordered now does nothing until after serious oil and gas shortages. It also makes our economic problems worse. Tying up billion-dollar chunks of capital that sit idle for 12 years and then take about 30 more to pay back probably worsens inflation. It also starves other sectors for capital, so that each big power station we build loses the economy about 4,000 net jobs compared with the mixture of investments we might otherwise have made. As with other centralized, electrified high technologies, building and running nuclear plants concentrates economic and political power in private oligopolies and public bureaucracies. Guarding the uniquely dangerous nuclear materials-and the farflung electric grid, vulnerable to disruption by accident or malice-erodes civil liberties. Making nuclear decisions pits central authority against local autonomy, people who get the electricity against faraway people who have to live near the plants, and "we the experts" against "we the people." Thus, nuclear power creates serious political problems that are already straining the legitimacy of our institutions. Nuclear power involves very large amounts of persistently toxic and explosive materials. All the precautions taken to try to contain them are, for fundamental reasons, inherently imperfect to a degree that is essentially incalculable. Whether the biophysical hazards are large or not-and I suspect they are they raise serious social and ethical questions. Probably the greatest hazard of nuclear power is that it is now the driving force behind the proliferation of atomic bombs around the world. If a chicken is an egg's idea for making eggs, perhaps a reactor is a bomb's idea for making bombs. Nuclear power not only spreads the equipment, knowledge, and materials needed to make bomb materials, and the expectations and ambiguous threats that motivate their use, but also, increasingly, is directly spreading bomb materials themselves for research and commerce. Official projections imply international trade, a few decades hence, in tens of thousands of bombs' worth of strategic material per year, within the same community that has never been able to stop wars, hijackings, or the black market in heroin. The ensuing worldwide spread of bombs could not be prevented, would be irreversible, and would destroy the basis of our strategic deterrence policy. Our own nuclear commitments today make it impossible for us to expect other nations not to follow suit. Thus, with such commitments we cannot have an effective and internally consistent nonproliferation policy. But I believe we can have such a policy without those commitments. We must seize the opportunity briefly proffered by the collapse of the |