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Those who don't want to know any negative information about Lovins should certainly avoid reading Charles Barton's blog posts about him.
Given that Barton is, shall we say, a passionate holder of many very unusual views, I'd recommend avoiding reading anything written by him.
Read his crazed post at TOD Europe (and then about them, where he abused them for being nice enough to let him write a guest post) from a couple of months ago if you'd like confirmation.
Of course, his Dad did work at the ORNL, as he never tires of reminding everyone, so he does have a lot of "expertise" in the area.
Pro-nuclear can be a form of techno-optimism and certainly Mr Barton has a bad case, as you point out. This can lead to an intolerance of others. I'm going to keep trying hard to avoid that. I think the anti-nuclear case also suffers from techno-optimism, as we see in the Uni of Kassel video on youtube on how to survive with no baseload power. Nobody on the pro-nuclear side is trying to limit post-fossil fuel energy options. This is not the case on the anti-nuclear side. Those of us who haven't looked at the numbers and the facts have to come to our own conclusions based more on which experts seem more trustworthy. So this discussion of who seems to be trustworthy is quite relevant, if a little more personal than we would wish in a technical forum. [By the way, speaking of who seems trustworthy, my pick is Prof David MacKay. He is very left wing and pacificist, which fits my philosophy. His expertise is mathematical inference - he is head of the Inference group in the Physics dept at Cambridge. He has worked hard to use Bayesian inference and other skills in developing dasher: a text input system for disabled people who need control only one muscle - see the Google Tech video. The philosophy of "numbers not adjectives" and "modelling not arm-waving" seems crucial for getting the right answers to the Energy Crisis. And he's written a book on sustainable energy that is freely available (currently draft). So he's been game to put his numbers out there where they can be criticized.]
That's why part 1 of my 3 part program for addressing the Energy Crisis is: (1) Vigorous open expert investigation of all relevant facts. This includes potentially contradicting my other two points: (2) we can't afford to do climate change things which reduce our chances of getting through peak oil [like burning gas for electricity instead of coal]; and (3) nuclear energy is the core of post fossil fuel energy [after that runs out we've either got fusion (or deep geothermal or something I can't imagine) working or we're cactus]. This is based on the fact that there is no plausible account, that I know of, of running the world with diffuse and intermittent renewable energy. However see Option G in Prof MacKay's book. There are plausible accounts involving a large proportion of the world population dying. Some people seem comfortable with that, but at least I know that Prof MacKay wouldn't be.
Actually most nuclear advocates (not you personally) seem to be suffering from a form of reversalism from my viewpoint - a worldview that wants to return to the 1950's.
Solar power is the biggest available source of energy and will be the cheapest within a decade or two (large scale CSP is already cheaper than nuclear power if decommissioning costs are included - something the pro-nuclear camp always avoids).
It makes no sense to avoid making this the core of our future energy strategy and to instead try and base it on the crumbly foundation of nuclear which requires the extraction of a finite material with large attendant pollution, waste disposal and weapons proliferation issues (amongst others).
As for your comment about population, I've noted many times that there is no need for collapse, and I think the dieoff camp are, frankly, a bunch of ecofascist nuts - check out Jay Hanson's "War Socialism" site for a demonstration of why. By and large population crash doomers should be treated with extreme caution.
I think more people have already died of starvation as a result of PO than if it hadn't happened. Admittedly this is mainly due to a misguided response to it. Still I'm certain there'll be more, and the question is how bad it will be.
One of the problems that the nuclear power industry lives with is that the original designs, which are still with us, were developed with an eye to producing nuclear bombs as well. Safer designs were not pursued at that time, and not much has been done for 20 years. Granted that this is not a great time to be playing catchup. I guess a question that is going to be asked of anti-nuclear people over the next few years is: "Do you avoid going to France given that it is such a dangerous place with all that nuclear power?".
However, if I can somehow manage to avoid a self-contradictory position here, we need to avoid putting too much faith in techno fixes. We want to squeeze every drop out of stuff we know works. There is type I (autoimmune) diabetes in my family. We've been seeing "cure in 5 years" stories coming out for 25 years. Still waiting.
PO hasn't occurred yet, so people can't have died of starvation because of it. People have been dying of starvatyion ever since people existed - and they were dying in large numbers decades ago when both oil and food were plentiful.
We've been waiting for safe and clean nuclear power forever. I suspect we'll always be waiting.
Meanwhile we could be building large scale solar and wind power facilities right now, instead of talking about what we could possibly do to fix nuclear.