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."

Comments

"Study" includes subsidies

[LordFolken]

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

Re:And the largest solar power plant currently is.

[sunspot42]

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.

Re:Conditions Apply

[A beautiful mind]

Ok. Let's factor in the cost of transporting the energy or storing it to provide night time load handling capability and look at the costs again.

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.

In Japan and France, construction costs and delays are significantly diminished because of streamlined government licensing and certification procedures. In France, one model of reactor was type-certified, using a safety engineering process similar to the process used to certify aircraft models for safety. That is, rather than licensing individual reactors, the regulatory agency certified a particular design and its construction process to produce safe reactors. U.S. law permits type-licensing of reactors, a process which is being used on the AP1000 and the ESBWR.

FRAUD ALERT!

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

Re:FRAUD ALERT!

[HiddenCamper]

I work at a nuclear plant, and the "at cost" of selling our power is between 3.5 and 5.5 cents per kwh on average over a year based on whether or not we are shut down for refueling that year. This is at-cost, not for profit. nuclear would only cost 16 cents per kwh if the plant was awfully mismanaged with terrible performance.