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Nuclear Energy Now More Expensive Than Solar
js_sebastian writes "According to an article on the New York Times, a historical cross-over has occurred because of the declining costs of solar vs. the increasing costs of nuclear energy: solar, hardly the cheapest of renewable technologies, is now cheaper than nuclear, at around 16 cents per kilowatt hour. Furthermore, the NY Times reports that financial markets will not finance the construction of nuclear power plants unless the risk of default (which is historically as high as 50 percent for the nuclear industry) is externalized to someone else through federal loan guarantees or ratepayer funding. The bottom line seems to be that nuclear is simply not competitive, and the push from the US government to subsidize it seems to be forcing the wrong choice on the market."
Did everyone forget about molten salt and similar tech? It was here a week ago...
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/07/23/0125235/Worlds-First-Molten-Salt-Solar-Plant-Opens?from=rss
It factors in the subsidies for solar energy. Compares an absolute discount price of solar to the average of nuclear power, ignores the fact that nuclear energy is a constant supplier etc.
In short: sensational and bogus.
I think the rebuke mentioned earlier should be read as well: http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/07/gullible-reporting-by-new-york-times-on.html
Just because the follow-up costs of nuclear energy are consequently ignored in those calculations it has been so cheap so far. While the costs of the solar panels, installation, etc. is to be fully covered by the one installing it, the nuclear waste is handled by the government and so is the insurance.
Calculate the full costs, including recycling, insurance and the like and there is hardly any power source that's more expensive than nuclear energy.
Dude, you need a reality adjustment. It is estimated that there is enough surface-mineable thorium alone to power us for hundreds of thousands of years to come. In fact, just the thorium discarded from our surface-mined coal could power us for thousands of years.
Then when have fast breeder reactor designs which burn uranium at efficiencies orders of magnitude better than our current production reactors. These designs even allow you to burn up almost all of the nuclear waste from slow breeder reactors.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Now considering that one nuclear power station usually generates 1 to 5 GIGAwatts, and these generate in the order of TENS OF MEGAwatts
The Mojave plant already produces over 300 megawatts, the plant in Spain produces 100 megawats, and there are plans for solar plants of half a gigawatt to about a gigawatt. The Topaz Solar Farm in central California is supposed to produce 550 megawatts, and cost around a billion, which is steep but pretty comparable to the skyrocketing price of nuclear power. It's a PV installation. Of course solar only works during the day, but that's when demand is by far at its peak (especially in central and southern California) and customers pay the highest prices.
Why does the plant capacity make a difference, anyhow? Cost seems like a much bigger issue than capacity. If you can build and operate ten 100 megawatt solar plants for the cost of building, operating and decommissioning one 1 gigawatt nuke plant (and insuring it for liability, and dealing with its waste), why not go with solar?
I think real advantage solar offers over nuclear though comes from photovoltaics, which are also just starting to become practical, especially in warm sunny climates where peak summertime power rates spike. I think subsidizing the deployment of rooftop panels atop homes and businesses in places like California and Texas is going to be a more cost effective strategy than sinking tens of billions into nuke plants, and it'll help to advance a technology that could conceivably lead us to near total energy independence.
It also gets a chunk of power generation out of the hands of the enormous energy conglomerates and into the hands of the people, which'll make it much more difficult for the powers that be to play games with the price of electricity on the spot market, a la Enron. And moving power generation much closer to the source of demand could ultimately reduce the overall peak summertime load on our power grids (at least here in America), not to mention the drastic cut in transmission losses.
To be honest I don't buy the "nuclear is expensive" thing. It's expensive the way you're doing it. Learn from the French.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
The money shot from that, for those who are too lazy to follow the link:
"For the cost of solar electricity, Blackburn and Cunningham relied on reported offers of "commercial scale" solar electricity at a certain price to the grid supplier - without noting that those offers are on a strictly "when available" basis that is also take or pay.
Here is an analogy - if you happen to grow tomatoes in your yard, imagine going to your local grocery store and demanding that the grocer pay you the same price that he charges at retail. The grocer must take all of the tomatoes that your garden produces, but you make no promises about how many you will bring each day. When you want to eat tomatoes at home, but your garden has not produced any, you expect to be able to walk into the store and purchase all of the tomatoes that you need at the same price that you sold them for. (Actually, this is not a very good analogy, because on page 11 of their paper, Blackburn and Cunningham admit that certain solar electricity suppliers will actually be paid a "subsidized" rate of 19 cents per kilowatt hour, which is almost two times the residential retail price in North Carolina of 10.5 cents per kilowatt hour.)
In addition to failing to mention the terms and conditions under which electricity is being offered, Blackburn and Cunningham bury a few "minor" details about solar electricity real costs in an appendix. As they admit in a section that few people will read, the price that some installers are talking about charging utilities is the "net" price - after they receive and bank all currently offered payments from other taxpayers and after they have obtained taxpayer subsidized 25 year amortization, tax free loans. In North Carolina today, a homeowner who purchases a solar energy system receives a 30% cash grant from the federal government and a 35% cash grant from the state government.
Using the example provided in the paper, those cash payments turn a 3 KWe (max capacity), $18,000 system that produces electricity at 35 cents per kilowatt hour (if financed at 6% interest for 25 years) into a system costing the homeowner just $8,190 and producing electricity for a total of 15.9 cents per kilowatt hour - when the sun is shining. Of course, that means that the homeowner has received a grant of $9,810 from his or her neighbors, some of whom may not own a home (renters) or even own a roof (condo and apartment dwellers). Blackburn and Cunningham admit that they did not include energy storage costs of any kind (pg 11)."
and ...that shows the sustained price for modern nuclear power to be about $50/MWh or 1/3 of Solar. (That's in the US; in Eur/Jpn/Kor where their proficiency and experience is much better, about $0.033/MWh.)
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lfibbBnlKt8/TFAYotKn1yI/AAAAAAAAA4Q/e7giOX_5kV4/s1600/LCOE_Electricity_OECD.png
New York Times guilty of 'writing to their preconceptions' again.
-Styopa
Fraud Alert! My guess is that this story is a public relations piece by people who are trying to sell solar energy. Is a Slashdot editor paid to run P.R.?
Read the comment by "BillWoods" posted on "Tue, 2010-07-27 14:19" to the story linked in this Slashdot story. Quote: "Using the same amortization factor that they use for solar, the most expensive nuclear project on their list would produce power for a capital cost of about 11 cents/kW-h, well below even the subsidized cost of solar."
The previous comment, by "Marcel F. Williams", posted on "Tue, 2010-07-27 12:51" says, "The capital cost of nuclear reactors are going to fall dramatically once the US and other countries start to mass produce and ship centrally manufactured modular nuclear reactors. Its going to be extremely difficult for any other clean energy systems to economically compete against small nuclear reactors during the rest of this century for producing electricity and carbon neutral synfuels."
Wow! That was easy! Indicating the falsehood of the Slashdot story only required copying the comments in the linked story.
"Water vapor is the major green house gas ... This is relevant because Nuclear power plants, like coal fired power plants, are big steam engines, many of which release large quantities of steam into the atmosphere.
"
Wow. I can understand someone not knowing much about a subject, but I can't understand why they are inspired to spout off about it when they must surely realise they don't know what they are talking about.
The steam from those "big steam engines" is condensed. Not originally because of environmental concerns, but because it makes the steam engine far more efficient. Heard of James Watt? Gave his name to the Kilowatts and Megawatts mentioned here? He invented the steam engine condenser.
"Power plants like Diablo Canyon in Southern California get around the issue of needing large quantities of water by being feed by the ocean, but the new power plants on the Mississippi river seem to be causing other power plants to run short of water"
The sea or river water is not boiled away to the sky but goes through the "cold" side of the condensers and returns, slightly warmer, to the sea/river. The water being boiled for the turbines recycles over-and-over again - they would not want to lose it as that water is highly treated stuff.
I don't know Mississippi but it sounds like the river is being warmed enough to cause some loss of efficiency. The river water will not have been "lost".
Some power stations by smaller rivers use cooling towers to supplement the river cooling and these do emit some steam. But that steam is a small fraction of the primary circuit flow through the turbines or the secondary (river water) flow through the condensers.
The only large non-condensing steam engines were steam railway locos, but even some of those used condensers. Of course, oil and gas fired power stations, and internal combustion engines, emit lots of steam in their exhaust, most obvious on cold days, as the hydrogen in their fuel content is burned.
Or even build reactors that reprocess internally.