Slashdot Mirror

Eh, not much. Here is a report from the Royal Academy of Engineering. Using today's technology, if we build new power plants to produce our electricity from wind power rather than natural gas (the cheapest option) then we pay twice as much per kWh. (That's including standby costs.)

Now obviously using current technology we can't go 100% wind power (something has to *provide* standby), plus we'd need electric cars to reduce carbon emissions from transportation. However we have everything to get started now, and costs from wind power can only go down as operations scale up. In time we'll find the best way to handle standby (e.g. via hydrogen or improved battery technology, electric cars could help). Fossil fuels can only go up in costs, and always mean dependence on other countries in mainly unstable regions of the world.

How much of a price increase that means for an individual is hard to predict - there are many factors: how fast power plants get replaced (cheapest option would be to run them until they would normally go out of service anyway), how soon production costs go down, how much more efficient appliances get etc.

If we end up paying about twice as much for our electricity is that really the end of our lifestyle? Plus we'd have much reduced pollution allowing us to breathe much cleaner air, keep energy producing jobs in the country and would not flood our coastal cities. The US might even keep Florida around, and that's a nice place to retire, I hear.

Japan has a huge coast line, it's an ideal location for wind parks. Germany is investing heavily into that, but that means (among other things) to build HVDC transmission lines to reach the coast. Japan doesn't even need to do that. For reference, here is a report from the Royal Corps of Engineering about the costs of various power sources: Costs_Report. Wind is actually quite affordable despite the standby costs (taken into consideration by the report). Electric cars and demand shaping (e.g. with smart metering) could help bringing that down further.

Extreme circumstances are normal in the pacific ring of fire, and just like Germany, Japan has no place to store the spent nuclear fuel. Neither country can afford to lose a chunk of land like the region around Fukushima - they are densely populated and the land is highly developed and valuable.

That doesn't mean that nuclear power doesn't make sense anywhere, but Japan is the wrong place for it.

I want PROOF of nuclear plants that are cost effective (not excluding tons of government welfare.) We hear about next gen nuclear power and fuel recycling etc but its all just talk nobody ever cites an example. I've never seen it done yet so hypothetically, if examples are given, would they be verified credible examples?

There's tons of proof out there. Here are just a few examples I found:

The Costs of Generating Electricity: nuclear 2.26 pence/kWH, wind 5.35 pence/kWH
The Economics of Nuclear Power (average for EU 2007): nuclear: 6.4 cents/kWH, 9.8 cents/kWH

I'd say that The Royal Academy of Engineering should be pretty credible as a source. The Economics of Nuclear Power also cites a lot of credible sources which can be verified.

Nuclear can be safer, but it simply costs too much. I fact, it's the most expensive of the alternative options. Safe or not, it's only a stop gap until other systems are running.

Citation needed ?

Britain's Royal Academy of Engineeringc ertainly don't agree with you:
http://www.countryguardian.net/generation_costs_report2.pdf

Note that their study included decomissioning costs for nuclear ( not that it makes a difference, most of France's reactors quote numbers in the hundreds of millions for decomissioning while the cost of building them was several billions ).

Seriously, the bullshit about nuclear being expensive is simply not true unless you look at excessive cost overruns imposed by frivolous legal challenges and governments delaying projects without good reason. In contrast Japan's recent ABWR projects were completed on time and under budget, but then they don't let groups like greenpeace file nonsense legal claims halfway through construction, forcing companies to delay half-finished projects, thus losing hundreds of millions in costs due to ticking interest rates.

It is true that Areva had some issues with their latest reactor in Finland ( mainly because decades of negligence has left Europe without the expertise to build reactors ), but given that the EPR reactors are designed to be about 30% cheaper than coal, even doubling the costs won't make them as expensive per unit of energy as wind power.

Also, before somebody starts going on about Nuclear not being CO2 neutral due to CO2 being emitted when structural materials is produced. The same applies to wind and solar, and nuclear is in fact THE energy source with lowest CO2 emissions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Greenhouse_emissions_by_electricity_source.PNG

The only way you could arrive at the nonsense conclusion that Nuclear is more expensive than wind and solar is if you ignore all problems the renewables have, while grossly exagerating the costs of nuclear ( perhaps by quoting numbers from the 50ies and compare them to the forecasted numbers for solar in 2030 ), or if you use return of investment figures from a country like germany, where utilities are forced to buy wind power from you at a high price weather it is profitable or not.

Interestingly this is typically what is done. Solar enthusiasts quote prices to achieve 1W in equatorial peak output ( i.e noon in the sahara dessert ) , wind power enthusiasts typically quote the price the consumer in Germany or Sweden pays, failing to mention that those countries have either subsidised the price or outright forced companies to invest in wind power at a loss, without allowing nuclear to progress ( both Sweden and Germany has banned investments into nuclear following influence from green parties that hold a very small minority of votes ).

But nooooo, we will not look at reality, we will use greenpeace's massaged statistics and ignore retarded government policy , despite the fact that France and Japan keeps proving us wrong. As an environmentalist and physicist I'm very bitter. Sweden could have got rid of fossil fuels by now if it had not been for the retarded nuclear phaseout, instead our carbon emissions keep increasing amid politicians who claim to be environmentally friendly even as they replace our domestic nuclear capacity with Danish and Finish coal.

$1.8bill isn't a lot of money when compared to the cost of nuclear power

From anti-wind groups like Country Guardian, a very small organisation campaigning against wind energy . Country Guardian used to operate out of a building owned by British Nuclear Fuels.

If the reality of global warming is so grave -and I believe it is- we need solutions that can be deployed much faster than your average nuclear plant.

You can put up a Wind turbine in 2 years, including 1 year to determine the area's potential. Add planning and siting for a nuclear plant, and you're looking at least 5 years.

Not only that, it will take a bit longer for each solution to be energy positive. To build and transport anything, you need energy... and IIRC, a nuclear plant has to produce for at least a year before producing as much as was needed to build it and mine the uranium. Even assuming 2 years for a wind turbine, it's producing energy before the nuclear plant is even built.

So call me a crank, but notice that Lovelock has been opposed to wind energy because it just ain't pretty, and is a notorious flake that posits the Earth as a self-aware and self-healing organism (getting rid of us pests). Occam's razor, anyone?

The most mind-boggling part of this debate, of course, is that there are much faster ways to reduce our energy consumption than we can produce more. A compact fluorescent lightbulb is a cliche example, but you can reduce energy consumption by 75%, with a payback of less than 1 year. Just like you would pay off your debts starting with the highest-interest bearing credit cards, if you want to find the cheapest way to balance energy consumption you start with the 100% return investments (lightbulbs) before the 5-6% ones (nuclear plants).

If you understand global climate change to be a serious problem, start with conservation. And please, help discredit these green scientists that are neither green nor scientists.