Mark Lynas pens error-riddled, cost-less nuke op-ed

[bananas]

http://climateprogress.org/2011/04/13/mark-lynas-error-cost-nuke-op-ed/

Mark Lynas pens error-riddled, cost-less nuke op-ed
April 13, 2011

UPDATE: In the comments, Lynas says Breakthough Institute made the initial mistake. They must have fixed it before I saw it. But there are so many errors that it’s still not clear who got what wrong.

And the winner of the most egregiously error-riddled paragraph published in a presumably fact-checked newspaper op-ed this year:

According to some recent number crunching by the Breakthrough Institute, a centrist environmental think tank, phasing out Japan’s current nuclear generation capacity and replacing it with wind would require a 1.3-billion-acre wind farm, covering more than half the country’s total land mass. Going for solar instead would require a similar land area, and would in economic terms cost the country more than a trillion dollars.

No, it’s not Charlie Sheen weighing into the energy debate. And no, there aren’t any typos. Sadly, this breathtaking collection of whoppers is by none other than Mark Lynas, author of the excellent book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet.

I’m not quite certain what is more depressing — that Lynas wrote this paragraph in the first place and has since reposted it at the Economist’s online nuclear debate (a debate that is, typically, poorly framed). Or that not one person at the LA Times, Economist, or McLatchy thought the numbers looked funny or self-contradictory enough to spend even 10 seconds on Google to fact-check them. Or that even two days later the head-exploding errors are still there.

See how many errors you can count before reading the rest of the post.

While I realize that “acres” is not a metric most people work with often, presumably if you are going to use acres you would at least check on Google to make sure your answer is not wrong by, say, a factor of 1000! Or that you haven’t gotten the area of Japan wrong by a factor of 30! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

<snip>

This doesn't surprise me, I've found that pro-nukes frequently get their math wrong by several orders of magnitude.
I've learned to never believe the numbers from a pro-nuke because they are so often wrong.