Energy - Environmental Science - page 306

phasing out all or most government subsidies and tax
breaks for nuclear power and using the money to ac-
celerate the development of other, more promising en-
ergy technologies.
To these critics, conventional nuclear power is a
complex, expensive, inflexible, and centralized way to
produce electricity that is too vulnerable to terrorist at-
tack. They believe it is a technology whose time has
passed in a world where electricity will increasingly be
provided by small, decentralized, easily expandable
power plants such as natural gas turbines, farms of
wind turbines, arrays of solar cells, and hydrogen-
powered fuel cells. According to investors and World
Bank economic analysts, conventional nuclear power
simply cannot compete in today's increasingly open,
decentralized, and unregulated energy market unless
it is artificially shielded from free-market competition
by huge government subsidies.
Proponents of nuclear power argue that govern-
ments should continue funding research and develop-
ment and pilot-plant testing of potentially safer and
cheaper reactor designs along with breeder fission and
nuclear fusion. They insist we need to keep these nu-
clear options available for use in the future if renew-
able energy options fail to keep up with electricity de-
mands and reduce CO 2 emissions to acceptable levels.
Germany does not buy these arguments—it has plans
to phase out nuclear power over the next two decades.
However, China plans to build a number of nuclear
power plants.

Energy Inputs System Outputs

9%

7%

41%

U.S.
eco n omy
and
lifestyles

85%

43%

8%

4%

3%

Nonrenewable fossil fuels
Nonrenewable nuclear
Hydropower, geothermal,
wind, solar
Biomass

Useful energy
Petrochemicals
Unavoidable energy
waste
Unnecessary energy
waste

Figure 13-21 Energy waste: flow of commercial energy
through the U.S. economy. Only 16% of all commercial energy
used in the United States ends up performing useful tasks or
being converted to petrochemicals; the rest is unavoidably
wasted because of the second law of thermodynamics (41%) or
is wasted unnecessarily (43%). (Data from U.S. Department of
Energy)

x

cording to the DOE, the United States still wastes as
much energy as two-thirds of the world's population
consumes.
Reducing energy waste requires improving energy
efficiency by using less energy to do more useful work.
In other words, we must learn how to do more with
less. Reducing such energy waste has numerous eco-
nomic and environmental advantages (Figure 13-22).
Improvements in energy efficiency since 1973
have cut U.S. energy bills by $200 billion per year.
Nevertheless, unnecessary energy waste costs the
United States about $300 billion per year—an average
of $570,000 per minute.
Four widely used devices waste large amounts of
energy:

H OW W OULD Y OU V OTE ? Should nuclear power be
phased out in the country where you live over the next 20-30
years? Cast your vote online at http://biology.brookscole
.com/miller11.

13-4 IMPROVING ENERGY EFFICIENCY

Science: Wasting Energy
The United States unnecessarily wastes about 43%
of the energy it uses.
You may be surprised to learn that 84% of all commer-
cial energy used in the United States goes to waste
(Figure 13-21). About 41% of this energy is lost auto-
matically because of the degradation of energy quality
imposed by the second law of thermodynamics (p. 30).
Another 43% is wasted unnecessarily, largely as the re-
sult of using fuel-wasting motor vehicles, furnaces,
and other devices, and living and working in leaky,
poorly insulated, poorly designed buildings. (See the
Guest Essay on this topic by Amory Lovins on the
website for this chapter.)
Energy efficiency in the United States has im-
proved since the oil price shock in 1979. Even so, ac-

■ An incandescent light bulb wastes 95% of its energy
input of electricity. In other words, it is a heat bulb.
■ A nuclear power plant producing electricity for
space heating or water heating wastes about 86% of
the energy in its nuclear fuel and probably 92% when
we include the energy needed to deal with its radioac-
tive wastes and to retire the plant.
■ A motor vehicle with an internal combustion engine
wastes 75-80% of the energy in its fuel.