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

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[Anonymous Coward]

Except during nights.

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[ThoughtMonster]

Which also means you'll need to buy batteries, which are quite expensive, and have a fairly short lifespan. Which was always the point.

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[eexaa]

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

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[StripedCow]

Except, it's always day on some part of the planet...

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[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.

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[AlecC]

Pumped storage is certainly possible. But sites are not common, and it adds to capital costs - which add to production costs. The costs of both PV and pumped storage are dominated by capital costs, so this crossover is unlikely to have occurred if you have to add in pumped (or other) storage.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Did everyone forget about molten salt and similar tech? It was here a week ago...

Plus night time usage is not the problem, it's daytime demand that is the problem, so large scale solar plants could help reduce them and thereby reduce emissions. There is plenty of other use cases for solar power such as domestic air conditioners in places like Florida, why run them on grid power when you can install solar cells on the roof and use them to power your air conditioner, or you could use solar cells for charging your hybrid/electric cars. In Germany I've seen roof mounted solar cells being used even in colder climates for heating/lighting and to generally reduce dependence on grid power. The problem is that while solar remains an expensive option users of coal/oil/gas are enjoying cheap energy prices because nobody is making them or their suppliers pay for the environmental mess these energy sources are causing. There was an interview with an ex-oil executive on BBC Hardtalk recently. The reporter suggested making fossil fuel users pay the full price for their fossil fuel products, that is the extraction/production/transportation/etc... costs plus the environmental costs of things like carbon emissions due to oil shale processing... for a second there I thought I'd actually get to see steam coming out of a guys ears. He narrowly resisted the temptation to go totally ballistic and started ranting on about how the energy policy choices sovereign nations should not be questioned and rioting in the streets (that last part is probably a legitimate concern in some countries). People think coal/oil/gas is cheap but in reality it's just that a big part of the cost is being off loaded on the environment, if you factor that damage into the equation oal/oil/gas alluvasudden gets a lot more expensive.

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[PopeRatzo]

We are still pissing ourselves laughing at it's price..........
There is no way it is going to be sold unsubsidised for 16c per kwHr

And of course, prices on new technology never go down.

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[panda]

Hi, my name is Yucca Mountain. I'd like to disagree with you about the costs of nuclear energy.

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[upower]

Or have long lifespan and good power output as reported a couple of days ago such as Toshiba SCiB. http://www.scib.jp/en/product/detail.htm

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[nospam007]

"There is no way it is going to be sold unsubsidised for 16c per kwHr"

Storing and guarding nuclear waste for 184000 years isn't cheap either.

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[tomhudson]

No, you have several choices:

Pumped storage. Remember those water towers near factories? They were used to drive generators for extra peak power. Any form of dam would also work - or even just raising a huge weight, or compressed air in an underground chamber.

Using reflectors to heat up your steam generator - an idea from the 1970s. That retained heat can drive your steam plant until the next morning.

Eutectic salts - ditto.

Inertial storage systems, such as composite flywheels running in a vacuum - covered in Scientific American circa 1973.

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[TwiztidK]

Thats because we don't have the sense to reprocess our nuclear waste like other countries (read: France).

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[JohnBailey]

Except during nights.

Yep..When all those offices and factories and everything are up and running.

Oh wait..

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[CrimsonAvenger]

Except, it's always day on some part of the planet...

True enough. Did we factor into the cost of Solar the cost of electrical transmission lines under the Atlantic Ocean sufficient to supply North America's power needs?

I didn't think so.

Oh, and how much extra capacity did we assume for Solar in our price comparison to allow for pumping water uphill, or melting salt, or whatever, to deal with night/clouds/etc? None?

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[Chatterton]

Yes, it is interesting to compage a prototype of surgenerator to a 'traditional' reactor. Superphenix was a prototype taken in the struggle of political battles by the green parties.

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[hey!]

At present, the most efficient "battery" would be unburned fossil fuels. The biggest advantage is that we already have the infrastructure in place to store energy as unburned fossil fuel; we simply use less of it during the day.

That's not a viable technology in the long term, but the long term gives us plenty of time to come up with efficient storage technologies (in any case if we don't collect it, that sunlight is going to waste). We should also expect to get energy from a greater variety of sources in the future, nuclear may be part of that.

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[LurkerXXX]

They don't have roofs in Chicago?

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[Wonko the Sane]

Or even build reactors that reprocess internally.

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[dtfusion]

How do all of these storage solutions scale? EG Pumped storage for all of Chicago would require putting an area comparable to Chicago's underwater (600 km^2). Pumped storage has an capacity of a few Watts per m^2 depending on the depth change available (typically a few meters). Chicago uses energy at an average rate of 20 GW so you need an area on the order of 10^10 m^2 or a square area that is 100km on a side. BTW In Illinois about half the power comes from nuclear, the other half from coal.

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[SysKoll]

I agree. I question the mode of cost calculation in the article.

Here is a reference point. 82% of France's electricity comes from nuclear power plants. The price of power for industrial customers is about 0.06 USD/kWh. This includes huge personnel and pension costs (powerful unions) and sloppy financial management (politically appointed execs). So it means that actual production and delivery costs are below this price point. Since EDF, the French electricity semi-public firm, is a monopoly, there is little incentive to be more cost-effective. And yet, even so, they achieve a cost of 6 cents per kWh.

I am therefore not impressed with the 0.16,USD/kWh quoted. It' s almost 3 times more expensive than what the French can get, without even trying to be cost-effective.

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[LWATCDR]

A lesson that the Navy learned early.
They standardized a reactor called the S5W it was used for the Skipjack class of subs, the George Washington Class, The Ethan Allen Class, the Permit class ,the Sturgeon class, The Lafayette class, and the Ben Franklin class. It may well be the most produced type of reactor in history "Don't know about Russia I know they built one reactor type for the Hotel, Echo, and November class but I am not sure of the numbers. This article is fud but the headline will cause people to believe it without question.

And we so need to get it through peoples heads. If you bring up Chernobyl when talking about modern western reactors you are spreading FUD.

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[ShadowRangerRIT]

To be fair, France benefits from a much more centralized population. The U.S. can't just build enormous nuke plants and send power by wire across the country without serious losses on the line. France is small enough that it can send power to a larger number of people with shorter lines, and moreover, they benefit from economies of scale, because they aren't just powering France, they're selling the power to neighboring countries (presumably at a profit).

They also engage in fuel reprocessing, which the U.S. does not, and that makes a huge difference in the economic factors. The U.S. policy is due to a fear of plutonium being stolen from reprocessing facilities for use by terrorists or rogue states, combined with a need to "set an example" to other countries; if we reprocess fuel, then they'll claim they should be allowed to as well, but reprocessing fuel is an easy way to produce bomb grade fissionable material. I don't know if I agree with the U.S. policy (wasting tons upon tons of usable reactor fuel to set an example seems pointless when no one follows the example, and you end up with political quagmires like what to do with all the waste), but the costs in the U.S. are definitely higher.

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[js_sebastian]

I agree. I question the mode of cost calculation in the article.

Here is a reference point. 82% of France's electricity comes from nuclear power plants. The price of power for industrial customers is about 0.06 USD/kWh. This includes huge personnel and pension costs (powerful unions) and sloppy financial management (politically appointed execs). So it means that actual production and delivery costs are below this price point. Since EDF, the French electricity semi-public firm, is a monopoly, there is little incentive to be more cost-effective. And yet, even so, they achieve a cost of 6 cents per kWh.

Right. But I bet most of the plants were built by the French government (read military) in their effort to become a nuclear power, and EDF does not pay huge interest costs on the gigantic loans that would have been needed to build them, nor does it pay for waste disposal. Nuclear energy has been hugely subsidized throughout its history because of its military applications, and now the plan seems to be to start hugely subsidizing it for "ecological" reasons.

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[DrBoumBoum]

Please stop that bullcrap about reprocessing being the panacea for nuclear waste and French success with it. Just today Le Monde published an article (sorry, French) showing that France is processing not more than 20% of its waste, probably less. The rest was simply sent to Russia to be piled up there, up to a recent scandal. The hundreds of tons of nuclear waste produced yearly are currently only sitting there, waiting for someone to take care of the problem. Nuclear industry claims that it will eventually be used in hypothetical 4th generation reactors, which are exactly as likely to become a reality as economically viable fusion reactors are.

Nuclear waste is a real issue, the fact that some pro-nuclear nerds feel good laughing away any concern about it as illiterate idiots' fears doesn't make it less so. Parrotting French industry's lies about them having found or being close to find a magical solution about it doesn't make them more of a reality either.

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[vtcodger]

***I am therefore not impressed with the 0.16,USD/kWh quoted. It' s almost 3 times more expensive than what the French can get, without even trying to be cost-effective.***

Dead on. The article has many numbers, none of which seem to be consistent with either reality or each other. As of last December, Vermont utilities were paying Vermont Yankee which is about 100 miles down the road from the author 4.2 cents/kwhr and Entergy was trying to wheedle an increase to 6.1 cents.

I'm not against solar power or wind, or cogeneration or any other sane non-fossil fuel based technology for meeting energy needs. But this report appears to me to be 100% pure Vermont cow manure. Based on what I can see, it's best and highest use would be to burn all the copies for heat next winter. Winters in this part of the world are a bit nippy.

(And solar probably is not a 16cent/kwh hour choice for Vermont anyway. Too far from the equator, too much cloud cover, and for three or four months of the year, snow would have to be mechanically removed from the collectors. Now for Honolulu, Barstow, Tucson, or Las Vegas ...)

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[vtcodger]

***The U.S. can't just build enormous nuke plants and send power by wire across the country without serious losses on the line.***

You sure about that? I tried to research transmission line losses recently, and came up with a rather hazy 3-8%. And we already do routinely send electricity many hundreds of kilometers -- as, for example, from Boulder Dam to Southern California. Do you have a reference for higher losses? Seriously, I'd like to read it.

Nuclear plants will generally be built within a few hundred kilometers of their loads. Wouldn't make lot of sense to build one in One Tree Gulch North Dakota unless there are users nearby.

If your point is that the US power grid probably can't handle a major buildout of electric power of any sort, I fear you are probably correct. But that applies equally to wind, solar and nuclear.

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[operagost]

To be fair, France benefits from a much more centralized population. The U.S. can't just build enormous nuke plants and send power by wire across the country without serious losses on the line.

Irrelevant. We're going to need to wire power all over the nation, no matter from what source it is derived. We can't just plop solar generators in every community-- that would result in an historic eminent domain grab to the enrichment of the eco-capitalists.

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[MrNiceguy_KS]

I'm sure the French plants, being government built, weren't subject to idiotic "environmental" groups filing lawsuit after lawsuit to try to prevent the plant from being built. The summary says that the default risk for nuclear plant loans is as high as 50%. I would bet that the 50% default is because of plants that never produced a watt of power because they were tied up in court until the whole project was abandoned.

If we can eliminate the costs of legal challenges, (and the costs of the construction delays that result,) nuclear power wins, hands down.

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[DerekLyons]

They standardized a reactor called the S5W it was used for the Skipjack class of subs, the George Washington Class, The Ethan Allen Class, the Permit class ,the Sturgeon class, The Lafayette class, and the Ben Franklin class.

That was an accident of history more than anything else. Thresher/Permit started life as 'Improved Skipjack'[1] and even though it evolved all out of recognition retained S5W. The same applies to George Washington (modified from Skipjack) and Ethan Allen (a mashup based of off Skipjack and Thresher/Permit). [2]

The balance of the SSBN's that compromise the '41 for Freedom' are all incrementally evolved from Ethan Allen, so they ended up with S5W as well. The fact that they were all designed and built in a short time frame on an accelerated schedule contributed mightily to this. Sturgeon retained S5W because she was also essentially an evolved Thresher/Permit.

So S5W was retained not because of any conscious decision to standardize, but to hold engineering effort and costs so as not to jeopardize construction and maintenance schedules. Between new construction boomers and SubSafe overhauls, US submarine shipyard capacity and budgets were maxed out throughout the bulk of the 1960's. (Scorpion had her SubSafe overhaul delayed and then only had a minimal overhaul because of this - which is often considered as one of the potential causes for her loss.)

On top of which, there really isn't a 'standard' S5W installation - they varied considerably between classes, there's several different machinery and reactor compartments layouts. (Including the unique installations like Jack and Lipscomb.) Not even the cores were standard - they varied by class and over time. So really, the S5W ended up being a family of roughly similar reactors rather than a single 'standard' reactor.

On top of which, by the mid 60's, the USN recognized that they'd created a problem - ship displacement has grown considerably while the output of the S5W power plant... hadn't. Hence both the 'Super-640' (the unbuilt follow on to the Franklin's) and the Los Angeles classes had new reactors because of this. (The Los Angeles's was also designed for increased stealth.)

I'm also told (and I invite correction) that the standardization in France is leading toward a 'monopoly/monoculture' because when one company can consistently underbid the others, it has gradually driven competitors from the field.

[1] See Friedman's US Submarines since 1945.
[2] Ethan Allen essentially uses Thresher/Permit's engineering spaces with a Skipjack bow. (Though there's a lot of detailed systems differences throughout the ship as Ethan Allen and her descendants were a deep divers like the Thresher/Permit's.)

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[dgatwood]

That's only 16 years if your total output from panels is consistently greater than your demand even at peak load and you drain your batteries fully every night. If your demand wavers significantly, you might be drawing power off the batteries some of the time during the day, and thus could be using more than one charge cycle per day. If you don't discharge fully at night, you could be using fewer than one charge cycle per day. So that's a good estimate, but how good depends highly on the installation details.

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[dgatwood]

Oh, and I also forgot to mention that those numbers are probably under ideal circumstances. Temperature, charge rate, etc. can have a big impact on the actual life expectancy. Constant trickle charging is probably the hardest thing you can do to a battery, so unless your charge system is smart enough to handle the "battery full" condition reasonably and dump excess power into a dummy load or whatever, you might get significantly less than 6k charge cycles.

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[FoolishOwl]

US policy is to deliberately create unnecessary nuclear waste, instead of recycling it via proven technology, when one of the biggest objections to nuclear power generation is the production of nuclear waste?

I hadn't realized this. This is pretty appalling.

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[hey!]

The end result is coal being burnt.

The end result is coal being burnt at a lower rate, starting at a date that is sooner than it would be feasible to phase out coal.

The alternative is to burn coal at faster rate, until it looks like we're running out of it, and hope that will be early enough to find a complete replacement for it.

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[LWATCDR]

"So S5W was retained not because of any conscious decision to standardize, but to hold engineering effort and costs so as not to jeopardize construction and maintenance schedules."
Sounds like a great reason to standardize to me.
The Thresher may have started out as an improved Skipjack but it really didn't end up that way.
The Thresher had a totally different hull shape, it was much quieter because it used rafting, it had totally different bow Thresher and Permit used a spherical sonar array and had torpedo tubs mounted amidships. While Skipjack used a conventional array and bow mounted tubes.
So I would put them as two very different classes.
But what in effect you are saying is that the Navy Standardized reactors to save time and money. Which is the best reason to standardize anything.
The Lipscomb, as well as the Tullibee and Narwal are all considered one offs. For some reason the Jack is not.

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[DarkVader]

I agree. Where the government is the utility, things are already better than where private industry has been allowed to make their mess.

I'd be in favor of nationalizing all the electric utilities.

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[AnotherBlackHat]

Once you go from photovoltaic to solar thermal, you have to add the capacity to store heat in your heat reservoir and extract it. That increases costs significantly...

Does it? I'd think heat storage could be as simple as a lined hole in the ground.
Digging a hole the size of a 10 story building (which is about what you'd need for a 100 megawatt steam plant) and lining it with concrete isn't free, but no where near the cost of everything else you need. I'd estimate less than a 10% increase in cost. And that's without imagining "high-tech" solutions like molten salt.

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[tomhudson]

They all scale just fine - as a matter of fact, inertial storage is being looked at to help do load balancing at the local level irrespective of how the power is being generated.

Pumped storage can be situated hundreds of miles away to take advantage of local geography.

What's with the conclusion?

[dimethylxanthine]

The bottom line seems to be that nuclear is simply not competitive

Of course the same people would be arguing that oil and gas are the way to go.

USD per watt and watts per sqm

[psone]

Nuclear power offers the advantage of massive energy production on a small area of land, giving it a high W/skm rate. The ideal solution probably lies in the intelligent combination of several powering solutions depending on the zone type, energy demand and area coverage...

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[LSD-OBS]

Yeah, but nuclear fuel is running low

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.

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[micheas]

Care to support this with a citation? The only news I read about nuclear is how to get rid of waste and at the same time stop teRRists from getting it.

I don't have a citation handy, but as I understand the situation, the rich uranium deposits are very low, resulting in the mining of lower grade deposits, Thus the cost of extracting uranium is going up, on a semi permanent basis.

That said, Uranium is a fairly small cost of a reactor, and reactors on the Mississippi river shut down when there is a concern over water, not uranium.

The other myth is that carbon dioxide is the major green house gas. Water vapor is the major green house gas (about 80% of the green house effect that makes earth livable is from water vapor.) 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.

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, so more power plants on the Mississippi probably will not result in much of an increase in electricity produced.

I don't know which issue the grand parent poster was referring to, but in summary, the economics of an isolated nuclear power plant looks pretty good, but when you put them in the real world ... well as the saying goes, the difference between practice and theory is small, in theory.

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[HungryHobo]

coal plants are the same- they require cooling and cause water vapour to be released.
Solar thermal, ditto, it needs a lot of water to run.
Pretty much any power plant which uses steam turbines has that drawback.

uranium isn't going to run out any time soon.

Water is the big greenhouse gas but the amount humans cause to be released vs natural evaporation from the oceans is trivial, methane, CO2 and other well known greenhouse gasses on the other hand are vastly more potent and we release a lot of them.

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[HungryHobo]

the difference of course is that the cost of uranium is a trivial factor when it comes to nuclear power.
The plants are expensive, the fuel could double, triple etc in price and it would barely be noticed next to the cost of the plant.

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[vigmeister]

The other myth is that carbon dioxide is the major green house gas. Water vapor is the major green house gas (about 80% of the green house effect that makes earth livable is from water vapor.) 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.

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, so more power plants on the Mississippi probably will not result in much of an increase in electricity produced.

I am not well up on the details of reactor design, but if they convert water to steam, run it through a turbine and then release it into the air, that is actually a plus in my book.

Steam essentially is simply water + energy. You can get creative with what you do to extract that energy.heat engines can vary in efficiency, but who cares? It was 'waste energy' anyway.

Cheers!

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[zippthorne]

Yeah, Our current policy (Carrrterrrrrrrrrrrr!) is like buying a value meal at a fast food place, eating one fry, calling the rest "waste" and complaining about how expensive it is.

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[MrKaos]

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.

Thorium based reactors are a completely different technology stream from existing reactor technology and commercially undeveloped. If you are going to include thorium reactor technology with existing reactor technology then wouldn't it also be valid to ask if the spent fuel would be handled any better than the existing Nuclear industry? It's promising but I wouldn't want to relate it to the mess of the current nuclear industry.

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.

Except you are talking about a "Burner" reactor not a "Breeder" reactor and the technology for either type of fast reactor is not feasible with current materials technology. Even then you would still need a minimum of 30 years to resolve the infrastructure issues (mainly transporting the existing spent fuel) associated with it's implementation.

Re:USD per watt and watts per sqm

[nukenerd]

"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.

Re:USD per watt and watts per sqm

[Muad'Dave]

We've had proof-of-concept plants that show breeders, particularly the IFR to be pretty efficient and safe. The last US attempt was canceled by Clinton and his cronies.

You may find this article to be informative.

Re:USD per watt and watts per sqm

[MrKaos]

In fact, just the thorium discarded from our surface-mined coal could power us for thousands of years.

Meant to mention it in my last post. The spent fuel stream is thallium-208, a gamma emmiter - very nasty stuff to deal with - very hard to deal with. So we would have to have a waste repository designed, constructed and operational before we even start talking about Thorium based reactors.

To understand why the words of Dixie Lee Ray, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, proclaiming that the disposal of nuclear fuel would be "the greatest non-problem in history" and would be accomplished by 1985, yet here we are in 2010, over twenty years past that date and still there is no high level waste disposal site anywhere.

Re:USD per watt and watts per sqm

[Muad'Dave]

If you read these articles, you'll see that modern IFR reactors can be started on the existing nuclear WASTE from our current reactors, and need only a milkcrate-sized chunk of essentially unrefined uranium metal per month to continue operating ad infinitum.

Re:USD per watt and watts per sqm

[micheas]

I was very surprised to find out how much water seems to be lost in nuclear power plants, on paper you are right, one would think that it would almost all get recycled. Either economics or changing environmental regulations seems to cause evaporative cooling to be used. (this is for rivers that you cannot put over heated water back into them due to environmental regulations.)

If you read the commentary about super critical coal powered plants at http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/cooling_power_plants_inf121.html you will see something odd about the water usage projections for super critical coal plants.

Super critical coal plants and Nuclear plants on the Mississippi use about 30% more water than one would expect and it seems that this is being lost to evaporation in some manner that is not clearly explained and is just a best guess. Is this a secondary cooling system to comply with environmental regulations? I don't know but it seems like coal and nuclear power plants on the Mississippi are losing a lot of water to evaporation. I like you am not really sure why, because as you say, you basically run a closed system with a cooling system that should make the water loss just that of the evaporative effects of the water being a few degrees warmer.

Re:USD per watt and watts per sqm

[careysub]

...

I don't have a citation handy, but as I understand the situation, the rich uranium deposits are very low, resulting in the mining of lower grade deposits, Thus the cost of extracting uranium is going up, on a semi permanent basis.

That said, Uranium is a fairly small cost of a reactor...

You are correct on both points above (but not some of the others I cut out). Uranium costs are going up permanently. But they will only rise to the point where it is economical to extract from seawater, which contains more than 1000 times the supply of the current published reserve estimates which are based on a $130/kg ceiling cost.

The estimated cost of seawater extraction, based on technologies that have already been given small scale field trials, is about $300/kg. Uranium costs won't rise above this given the multi-thousand year supply that results. But uranium has already been sold on the spot market at $300/kg (in 2007), and at this price it only adds about 1 cent per kWHr.

It is the high capital cost that keeps nuclear plants off the utility company's purchase list, and creating incentives for long term investment in carbon reducing technologies will required to make them compete with new gas-fired power plants.

Re:USD per watt and watts per sqm

[HiddenCamper]

The plant I work at uses about 15,000 gallons per minute. When I say "Use" i mean, that is what we draw in from the river to replace what actually evaporates. We have a large pool of water that is many times larger than that which runs through the core multiple times. My plant has steam towers, if we had just pumped water directly in/out from the river we would 'evaporate' less, but still use a lot of water.

Re:USD per watt and watts per sqm

[stdarg]

I've never understood the proliferation argument when it comes to fuel reprocessing.

It's already possible for countries to develop their own nuclear programs against our wishes (i.e. Iran). Our moral standing on the issue is already difficult (we can have them, you can't because we don't trust you). I honestly don't see how our moral standing changes when we add to that, we can reprocess our waste, you can't. And our security standing also doesn't change -- countries aren't choosing to not pursue nuclear power because "it's too hard" or "we just don't get it" -- they face sanctions and stuff like that. Why would that go away just because we start reprocessing fuel?

Coal

[saibot834]

Yeah, and what about coal? Fossil fuels are still by far the cheapest ways of getting / storing energy. (I recommend reading "Physics for future presidents", which lists and explains the reasons for our "love" of oil/gas/coal).

I'm not arguing that we should use coal, but rather that a free market is inherently not (always) in line with protecting the environment. Sure, in the long run fossil fuels will become more expensive and "green energy" more affordable. But in the meantime, the government has to make sure that the industry doesn't destroy the environment. International treaties (Copenhagen, I'm looking at you) would have been a first step.

Re:Coal

[Anonymous Coward]

I am posting anon. since I am moderating here.
The problem with your posting is that you have it backwards. The reason why Coal is popular is because it receives the largest subsidies out of ALL energy (save nukes), AND the pollution costs are not considered in the price. Basically, Coal is popular, BECAUSE the gov. plays favorites with the free market. OTH, if they would quit subsidizing Fossil Fuels, AND would shift subsidies to what is in America's NEED:

1. a subsidy for no imports AND is emissions clean.
2. a subsidy for emissions clean AND baseload capable (24x7).
3. a subsidy for clean storage.

If you do the above, but with limited time and decreasing, then you will see that we do not need regulations. The free market works, but the problem is, that the feds play favorites with companies, rather than the needs of the nation. And remember that there is a difference between those two concepts.

Windbourne.

Re:Coal

[Aceticon]

Fossil fuels are the cheapest way to produce energy as long as they do not have to pay for negative externalities.

The byproducts of burning fossil fuels for electricity are just dumped in the air and as long those that are doing the burning do not have to pay for the negative consequences of those byproducts they can "produced" electricity for a lower cost.

Here's an example for your understanding:
- Imagine I came up with a process to get gold from seawater. Running the process would cost me $50 for every gram of gold produced. However this process would have the downside that for every gram of gold extracted it produce 1 cubic kilometer of highly toxic water and cleaning that would cost $1000.

If I have to pay for the negative externalities of the process ($1000 per gram of gold produced to clean-up the 1 cubic kilometer of toxic water produced as a side-effect) then my process is only competitive for gold prices above $1050 per gram.

However, if I can get away with just dumping the toxic water somewhere for free, then at $50 per gram of gold my process is highly competitive with getting gold the old-fashioned way (mining).

Generation of electrity from fossil fuels is currently at the point where they get away with dumping some of the toxic products created as a side effect of their process directly to the air without paying for it. Like my example above, their process is profitable because they don't have to pay for dumping toxic substances into the environment.

Re:Coal

[0xABADC0DA]

If I have to pay for the negative externalities of the process ... then my process is only competitive for gold prices above $1050 per gram. However, if I can get away with just dumping the toxic water somewhere for free, then at $50 per gram of gold my process is highly competitive

There is another angle to this. If you can improve your solar efficiency by 0.1% but it will cost you $10 million to modify the factory then you need to recoup that $10 million from sales that would otherwise go to competitors or not be made. If you aren't selling much then you have less ability to improve the product.

So the reason we should be investing a lot on solar in the form of subsidies is to grow the market, which will improve the technology as a side effect. The difference between solar and a lot of other green fuels is that there can be large improvements in the efficiency. Even if solar is not the cost effective choice now, we should still invest in it so that it will be.

Re:Coal

[iceaxe]

The problem of being that 'negative externalities' is a buzzword that means whatever the person using it wants it to mean and dragging in whatever costs at whatever rate they want to in order to 'prove' their point.

I agree that people should define what they mean by 'negative externalities', and back up claims with legitimate sources. Nonetheless, I think it's fairly widely held that burning fossil fuels produces some things which can be harmful to humans and other living things if allowed to escape into the general environment, as well as possibly contributing to the rate of climate change in some measurable amount. Considering those factors is not unreasonable.

The problem being that you, and many others, seem to have missed the whole environmental thing - where companies are being forced to pay for their wastes. (In the form of scrubbers that remove the toxic substances from the exhaust and the subsequent disposal thereof.)

Although I'm no authority on the matter, it seems to me that companies frequently do the absolute minimum scrubbing and cleaning that they can get away with (legally or by subterfuge) and even that they fight tooth and nail, including huge amounts of money (costs passed on to customers) spent on undermining the political process. While I'm certainly glad for any scrubbing that is done, I have grave doubts it would meet my personal standards for being able to say "we clean up our mess".

I do understand that things usually don't change overnight, but I also understand that there will always be people who would gladly let all life in the universe die out in a few hundred years for a few more digits in the bank account today. What we have to arrive at is a point somewhere in the middle that we can agree on (more or less) as being the best way forward. And most of all, we have to be willing to try things, and learn, and change.

As for solar vs. fission vs. whatever... use the tool that makes the most sense for a given task. If someone invents a better tool later, use that when it becomes available. Just don't keep using a tool when something better is available simply because somebody else is getting rich off of it.

Nuclear might not be competitive in hot climates

[Calinous]

But in cold and rainy climates, especially when electricity is used when it's cold outside (as opposed to when it's hot outside), nuclear can be much better than solar.

Comprehensive rebuttal

[Mugs]

Utter bunk. See http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/07/gullible-reporting-by-new-york-times-on.html

Re:Comprehensive rebuttal

[grimJester]

I'm as pro-green energy as anyone, but the chart here looks completely absurd. Nuclear has quadrupled in price in a few years? Even ignoring the trend lines, how on earth does nuclear go from 8c/kWh to 22 from 2005 to 2010? A jump like that can't be assumed to be a trend, surely.

The good news, assuming the data points can be trusted to be somewhat realistic, is that solar _is_ getting competitive and has changed significantly in a very short time.

Re:Comprehensive rebuttal

[Hinhule]

1. Energy industry cartels.
2. Energy industry realizes people will still use roughly the same amount of power regardless of price why not capitalize on that and make outrageous profits.

Re:Comprehensive rebuttal

[TheRaven64]

The trend is nonsense, but the data is not. A lot of nuclear fuel came from decommissioned nuclear warheads, over the past couple of decades. As a result, a lot of mines were shut down or reduced to a lower output because there was less demand. Now the spare warheads are almost used up, but it will take a couple of years to reopen the mines and get them up to production capacity. This means that there is currently a (short term) shortage of fuel for nuclear reactors, driving the price up. Once production increases again, this should stabilise (not, as that graph indicates, continue to increase forever).

Re:Comprehensive rebuttal

[TapeCutter]

The spot price for uranium peaked at just under US$140/lb in 2007 and since then has dropped well below US$100/lb. Fuel is chump change compared to capital costs, insurance, decommissioning, waste disposal, etc.

Re:Comprehensive rebuttal

[argStyopa]

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
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lfibbBnlKt8/TFAYotKn1yI/AAAAAAAAA4Q/e7giOX_5kV4/s1600/LCOE_Electricity_OECD.png ...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.)

New York Times guilty of 'writing to their preconceptions' again.

Except places where the sun don't shine ... much

[johnjaydk]

Fantastic for those who live in sunny states. A lot less great for those of us who don't. Try repeating those studies in northern Europe. For extra credit, factor in the saving from MODERN nuke plants. Even better, factor in the savings from serial production of those plants.

The plants in the US are ancient one-off designs. Small wonder they don't compare well.

Overregulation

[Coolhand2120]

I'm sure that the amount of regulation in plant creation, "green" subsidies for solar and "politically correct" as opposed to "environmentally correct" disposal of waste serves to distort the true price of these sources.

Besides, anyone who has played sim city knows that nuclear is much cheaper.

Re:Overregulation

[chrb]

the amount of regulation in plant creation

Every aspect of manufacturing and industry is regulated in the Western world. The factories that manufacturing solar cells are also regulated. Regulation is a cost of doing business. The BP spill should remind everyone of what happens when regulation fails.

"green" subsidies for solar

The study authors already thought of that - from TFA: "While the study includes subsidies for both solar and nuclear power, it estimates that if subsidies were removed from solar power, the crossover point would be delayed by a maximum of nine years."

"politically correct" as opposed to "environmentally correct" disposal of waste

Do you have any evidence that this occurs? Storage and disposal of nuclear waste has real costs - even nuclear industry scientists acknowledge that disposing of the UK's nuclear waste stockpile will cost £85 billion. Cleaning up decommissioned sites is costing £72 billion Who do you think pays for this - the nuclear industry, or the tax payer? Why are taxpayers subsidising disposal costs for new-build plants? The nuclear industry benefits enormously from the taxpayer.

Re:Except places where the sun don't shine ... muc

[bbtom]

"Fantastic for those who live in sunny states."

Yeah, it would be handy if there was some way of moving electricity from one place to another. Some sort of national grid service where power can be routed from the place it is being produced to the place it is required. I'm sure someone is working on something like that...

Re:Nuclear might not be competitive in hot climate

[dunkelfalke]

For cold climates, active solar water heating systems are a good alternative.
Read more here.

And by the way, in Germany on sunny days there is more electricity produced by photovoltaics than by nuclear reactors.

Dammit!

[wjh31]

I just had a reactor fitted to the south side of my roof aswell!

Re:Nights

[petermgreen]

That is true, however a worldwide power grid would be incrediblly expensive to install. Joining america to eurasia would require either long undersea runs or long runs through inhospitable places like sibera.

And the largest solar power plant currently is...

[AbbeyRoad]

Check out:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_thermal_power_stations

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations

Now considering that one nuclear power station usually generates 1 to 5 GIGAwatts, and these generate in the order of TENS OF MEGAwatts, it is inconceivable to me how anyone can compare Solar to Nuclear.

Where? In Manchester or California?

[evilandi]

Where is it cheaper? Cheaper than nuclear in the north of England, or just in the southern United States?

Hydro dams or wave power, possibly cheaper than nuclear near Manchester. Solar... not so much.

Re:Where? In Manchester or California?

[AGMW]

Where is it cheaper? Cheaper than nuclear in the north of England, or just in the southern United States?

Hydro dams or wave power, possibly cheaper than nuclear near Manchester. Solar... not so much.

Oh yes Manchester ... now if we could only harness the kinetic energy of the falling rain over Manchester we'd be able to power the world!

Re:Nights

[dunkelfalke]

There are already power lines in Siberia. There are even oil pipelines there.

Re:Nights

[Chrisq]

That is true, however a worldwide power grid would be incrediblly expensive to install. Joining america to eurasia would require either long undersea runs or long runs through inhospitable places like sibera.

If we keep up with global warming it might be tropical

Re:explain to me again

[gtall]

Wow, you mean the world is not fair? And you say we need to explain this to you? I don't know if that is possible.

Nuclear + reprocessing = much less to protect. And there was a European study reported in TheRegister awhile back, if you were to cover most of the Sahara with photo, you might be able to light up Europe..for now. So could you please get started, then we'll see about covering the U.S. south with photo.

"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:Except places where the sun don't shine ... muc

[Hognoxious]

If you're transmitting it from a place where it's summer to a place where it's winter, or from a place where it's noon to a place where it's midnight, you're going suffer pretty bad losses in those long long cables.

Unless you've invented a practical, economic room-temperature superconductor. In which case, send us a postcard from Stockholm. Sign it "smug asshole" - we'll know who it is.

Re:And the largest solar power plant currently is.

[evilandi]

Now considering that one nuclear power station usually generates 1 to 5 GIGAwatts, and these generate in the order of TENS OF MEGAwatts, it is inconceivable to me how anyone can compare Solar to Nuclear.

You forgot to consider the costs of building and decommissioning the power plant. A solar plant can be built and operational in a couple of months (or a couple of days if small-scale), with decommissioning taking half that. A nuclear plant takes 3-5 years to build and several hundred years, if not thousands of years, to decomission.

You need to factor in the whole life of the project.

I still think nuclear wins, but it's not a trivial choice.

Re:I wonder....

[rufty_tufty]

It's dead easy to kill fusion:
Explain to the Luddites about neutrinos. A fusion plant produces massive quantities of them that are free to radiate into the environment and no attempt is made to shield them. Not only that but there have been studies that show that neutrinos can transmute matter and therefore are a possible cause of cancer. No studies have been conducted about the effects of neutrinos on young children's development and so far all subjects exposed to neutrinos have later died or showed effects of cell degradation.

Solar power is cheaper for a long time already

[fadir]

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.

Re:Solar power is cheaper for a long time already

[c6gunner]

You know, no matter how many times you lie about it, you're not going to change what's true. Not only is it not true that the "follow up costs" are ignored, but they're actually overestimated due to the current policy of not reprocessing fuel. Change that, and electricity becomes even cheaper than the current calculations show.

Re:Solar power is cheaper for a long time already

[argStyopa]

Absolutely wrong.

This study does the opposite, in fact it builds in the gigantic subsidies for solar, and disregards the same for nuclear. Further, the replacement costs and long-term costs of nuclear are well known, this 'study' disregards that for solar.

Finally, this 'study' disregards any storage costs for solar, intermittance, or transport costs for the voltage.

Basically, solar has a strong potential for arid, sunny climates.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the Western World doesn't live in deserts, and power transmission isn't free.

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.

Thorium

[madsenj37]

What is its price compared to uranium?

Re:Nuclear might not be competitive in hot climate

[A beautiful mind]

And by the way, in Germany on sunny days there is more electricity produced by photovoltaics than by nuclear reactors.

That's because Germany has long have had an anti-nuclear stance, while actively promoting solar energy. Even they are reconsidering on keeping nuclear plants open for a longer time, in the wake of economic realities.

utter nonsense

[TheLoneCabbage]

The report compares running costs of a solar plant against the running costs of nuclear PLUS construction costs. Not only that but also chooses the most expensive plant designs, and takes the extremely high end estimates.

Taken from http://energyfromthorium.com/:

Fuel costs. Thorium fuel is plentiful and inexpensive; one ton worth $300,000 can power a 1,000 megawatt LFTR for a year – enough power for a city. Just 500 tons would supply all US electric energy for a year. The US government has 3,752 tons stored in the desert. US Geological Survey estimates reserves of 300,000 tons, and Thorium Energy claims 1.8 million tons of ore on 1,400 acres of Lemhi Pass, Idaho. Fuel costs for thorium would be $0.00004/kWh, compared to coal at $0.03/kWh.

Capital costs. The 2009 update of MIT’s Future of Nuclear Power shows new coal plants cost $2.30/watt and PWR nuclear plants cost of $4.00/watt. The median of five cost studies of molten salt reactors from 1962 to 2002 is $1.98/watt, in 2009 dollars. The following are fundamental reasons that LFTR plants will be less costly than coal or PWR plants.

Re:Nights

[HungryHobo]

"There is always day somewhere."

A lovely sounding line but try actually doing the math.

Unless you have a superconducting grid you lose massive amounts of power in transmission over long distances.
Try powering something off panels thirteen thousand miles away and you'll lose most of the energy in the lines.

And if they do build a superconducting grid the issue becomes that of keeping thirteen thousand miles of superconducting cable cools to the temperature of liquid nitrogen.
If your cable goes underwater in the sea you'll lose a shitload of energy. (magnetic field, conductor etc)

And don't forget that these superconducting grids will be dangerous as hell, if you're pushing enough current through a cable to power north america and any part of the cooling system fails the resistance goes from zero to anything non-zero and your superconducting cable explodes extremely violently.

It's always day somewhere.
unfortunately sometimes that place is in the middle of the pacific and your hundreds of thousands of square miles of solar panels along with the explosive cables would have to be on rafts capable of surviving whatever tropical storms come their way.

Re:USD per W + W per sqm for alkaline batteries

[Joce640k]

Why do people insist on using 1950s reactors as the basis of safety/cost measurements?
Modern reactors can be a lot cheaper/simpler and have very little decommissioning costs (the plant outside the core doesn't become radioactive over time).

Re:I wonder....

[Anonymous Coward]

I strongly doubt that... There are trillions of neutrinos flying through your head every second. Also, given that they fly though the entire planet without much care, and indeed the core of the sun, I doubt they will have much affect on your DNA. There is no attempt at shielding because it is pointless.

Not compeditive, w/ subsidization - even in France

[FriendlyLurker]

Yes, let's learn from the French: The French Nuclear Lesson If you don't like that review, there are plenty of others that demonstrate over and over Nuclear is not "competitive" (let's say viable competitive it will never be) unless your willing to increase taxes (or inflate your currency) to subsidize construction, operation and waste disposal to the hilt. That or you could always do what the Italians and some other countries have done, and just quietly dump it into the sea. Quotes:

"Like the U.S., France does not have a permanent solution for disposal. The cost of temporary waste storage -- hundreds of billions of euros -- is being passed along to French taxpayers and ratepayers by the state and its subsidized plant operators."

"The only other hope for nuclear would be to subsidize it, and subsidies must increase taxes, deepen the budget deficit, or both. That's not new in America: The fossil fuels industry receives more subsidies than all other forms of energy combined."

Re:I wonder....

[elFarto the 2nd]

I believe what our misguided friend means are Neutrons. Direct exposure to them is certainly something to avoid, but they can be captured effectively with water and lithium-6.

Re:Nights

[quanminoan]

"And don't forget that these superconducting grids will be dangerous as hell, if you're pushing enough current through a cable to power north america and any part of the cooling system fails the resistance goes from zero to anything non-zero and your superconducting cable explodes extremely violently.

I'd agree these superconducting cables have issues, but exploding really isn't one of them. Most modern superconducting magnetic coils and cables are designed around quenching and have copper dump loads built into the cables. The real killer for power is the energy required to keep the cables cool...

IMHO, the solution to solar would be affordable large scale energy *storage* (magnetic energy storage, large vacuum composite flywheels, etc.).

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!

[sycodon]

No worries.

Using their regulatory powers, the feds can jack up the cost of anything to as high as needed in order to make an argument for politically correct power generation.

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.

Re:FRAUD ALERT!

[MrKaos]

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.?...Wow! That was easy! Indicating the falsehood of the Slashdot story only required copying the comments in the linked story.

Well insurance companies won't insure Nuclear Power. That is the purpose of the Price-Anderson act, to limit liability so investors would put money into Nuclear power. It was originally set to expire in 1967 once the industry had proved itself safe. Evidently it hasn't. The continued existence of the Price-Anderson act illustrates that professional risk assessors consider the risks involved in the Nuclear Industry too high to be financially viable, so the federal government stepped in with a remedy. The Nuclear industry would not be able to exist without the protections the P-A act afford as no sane investor would expose themselves to that level of liability.

Actuaries and Risk Assessors are professionals in the insurance industry and their assessment of the Nuclear Industry is that they won't insure it without the Price-Anderson Act. They're not 'against' Nuclear power, they're just paid to asses the risks, professionally.

Speaking of subsidies the 2005 U.S energy bill provided another $13 billion dollars worth of subsidies this round to 2021 and re-authorised the Price-Anderson Act to underwrite the Nuclear industry with $600 Billion of Taxpayer money and closer to a trillion dollars if you factor the huge amount of land you are going to lose from a single accident.

Solar power doesn't require such a construct to be viable, or to exist. So let's not go waving the Fraud word around because the real fraud perpetrated is if the Nuclear power industry was forced to cover it's own liability and fund itself it would cease to exist.

Re:FRAUD ALERT!

[Culture20]

nuclear would only cost 16 cents per kwh if the plant was awfully mismanaged with terrible performance.

If the Simpsons has taught me anything, it's that this is the norm.

Solar cheaper than nuclear? Really?

[cbraescu1]

Simple rebuke of the silly claims in NYT here http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/07/gullible-reporting-by-new-york-times-on.html

If solar would really be cheaper than nuclear, why would the governments (in the EU) or the federal government / states (in the USA) need to subsidize solar deployments and consumption?

Slashdot editors failed once again to keep their brains on. Or maybe they knew the post is ridiculous, but they just succumbed to tabloidization: say something ridiculous in the first place then wait for the masses to take the bait and grow the advertising income.

In that case, Slashdot, please take into consideration the following possible posts:

Windows is safer than Unix.

Solar is cheaper than oil.

All Jews are actually Germans.

All Germans are actually French.

All Arabs use Unix.

Some French sell oil to the Arabs (especially at night, when solar is not working).

Vi is better than Emacs

Re:I wonder....

[rufty_tufty]

That was supposed to be the joke!
I'm well aware neutrinos pass through matter harmlessly in fact a light year of lead would still allow the vast majority to pass through. The point is that a minuscule percentage do happen to interact with matter very occasionally and so therefore everything I said was true.
It's supposed to be taking the piss out of those who would stop nuclear plants because of their radiation and scientists can't deny that you can't 100% shield against radiation, and you can't test on all possible effects and you can't prove a negative.
Meh, this is why I'm an engineer not a comedian...

Re:I wonder....

[rufty_tufty]

Nope I meant neutrinos, I know full well the sun produces trillions of them, I know that they are harmless.
I also know that CERN is harmless because cosmic radiation produces far higher energy collisions in the atmosphere every second, but some people still fear it.
I know that my local nuke plant produces gamma radiation that you cannot 100% shield against, yet people object to them because they "emit deadly radiation".
I carry a tritium keyring that has a half life and lights up my pocket with it's radioactive decay.
I use a mobile phone and don't worry about the fact that you can't prove that it doesn't do me harm.

So what I was trying to do was parody those who would pray on the fact that you can't prove a negative and other bits of lack of joined up thinking to sell their particular political cause. Still you can't please everyone...

Re:Nuclear might not be competitive in hot climate

[Anonymous Coward]

The Germans cheat on Nuclear power use. In particular, they IMPORT a lot of Nuclear-generated electricity from France and the Czech Republic.

Re:Not compeditive, w/ subsidization - even in Fra

[Chibi Merrow]

Waste disposal is a made up problem. That "waste" is very useful. Reprocessing it recovers almost all of the original fissionable mass, and the other products have medical and scientific applications. The remaining low-level crap can be glassified and dropped into a Yucca Mountain like storage depot (except that people's ignorance regarding nuclear waste and radioactivity makes them panic about that).

Re:I wonder....

[internic]

And you provided us with one more piece of evidence that Slashdot can't recognize a joke. ;-)

Re:And the largest solar power plant currently is.

[QuantumRiff]

Meanwhile, in the little town where I lived in Southern Oregon a few years ago, a Natural Gas 500MW power plant cost something like $80-100 million to build.

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?

Maybe not all of us want to see every square inch of desert covered in solar panels. Compare the surface area used to generate 1Gigawatt at a Nuke vs Solar...

Batteries?

[msauve]

So, you've never heard of pumped storage, or any other forms of grid energy storage, eh?

Re:I wonder....

[Kineticabstract]

Yeah, you have to work on your delivery. Note that you were modded 5, Interesting, and not 5, Yankin'-yer-chain.

Right this second on some discussion forum, an ignorant twit is ranting about the unstoppable-super-neutrino-radiation-killing-force that no one cares about that is killing our kids and OBAMA KNOWS!!!!!

And it's your fault. Just sayin'

;)

contract

[zogger]

Are you able to get a contract from your local utility to carve in stone that kilowatt hour price for ten, twenty or thirty years, get it locked in? If so, cool, if not, your figures are an apples and oranges comparison because you have no idea what your centralized grid supplied power will cost in the future. My guess would be..always go up.

Also, prices on panels..there is a theoretical way to get cheaper panels, do a mass bulk group buy and get wholesale instead of retail prices. Once you can deal with the real panel manufacturer instead of some middle man retail, well, it's just loads cheaper. Buy a few at a time, expensive, get a container load..cheaper.

Then there is also the benefit of having on site power that is clean and acts as a whole house UPS system. You get *good* power out of these systems, very clean, better than most grid supplied. This is worth something, along with I have noticed that grid supplied always seems to go out at the most inopportune time, right when you need it the most, cold ice storms (whoops! furnace stops working), heat waves (whoops, no AC or fans available, food melting away in freezer, etc), etc. Hard to put an actual cost figure on that, but it *is* useful to have your power supply better secured.

    Been there done that, went through a near week long grid outage, but because the place was mostly PV and batts (all circuits but the ancient outside heatpump), suffered not one second downtime (january ice and windstorm). In fact, I didn't even know the grid was down until the evening, when I noticed all the street lights down in the valley weren't on. A few hours grid downtime ain't bad, but days can start to get really sucky. Doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen across the nation to large segments of the people now and then.

Home produced you are paying a premium partially as it has a more "electricity insurance" benefit than grid supplied. That's worth something, but it is a variable situation to situation.

Another thing about solar PV is that it isn't an either/or situation, you don't have to replace all your needs, you can go one circuit at a time. Example, like noted above, it might be nice if your furnace circuit could stay up, to burn that natgas in your furnace in the winter, or to keep a window fan going in a heat wave, or to power your home office and all your expensive gear (we are geeks, we all appreciate a good UPS system, the benefits there). You can add on more PV powered circuits at your leisure, just start out with a large enough subpanel so you have upgrade room.

    So, like today, get one or two circuits, your most critical done, even if it is more expensive. Five ~ ten years down the road, your loot has gone to help fund more R and D and production, now the stuff is cheaper still, and better quality, more efficient. If everyone did this, eventually, it would be really slick, real cost competitive and quite functional. Look at the relatively short time frame when computers were still rare in the home and very expensive, to today, say the last 15 years. Thousands of bucks back then, for slow speed, limited ram and storage, etc, to today a few hundred bucks for systems much better overall. That's what economies of scale can do, once the ball really gets rolling and mass adoption and competition kicks in better.

Solar and other renewables

[shalomsky]

I just like the idea of renewable better. I would rather just live without the electricity if I can't get it from these sources. I don't use ac now in my car or at home. I just get along without it. My office has ac though. I would rather pay more for renewable energy, regardless of cost.

NYT really blew it

[Animats]

That's an amazingly bad article for the New York Times. It's based on a single paper which reads like a sales brochure. The figures for power costs are after subsides. Solar power isn't charged with storage costs. (Although, in hot areas, the solar peak coincides with the air conditioning peak. Wind has much worse problems; output is totally unrelated to when power is needed.)

Their projections are even worse. Their projection graph has data points in the future, which they then fit with a line. What? The SolarBuzz solar power price index, which is from a solar advocacy group, is far higher than the numbers in that paper. SolarBuzz shows a decline from $0.22/KWh in 2000 to $0.19/Kwh in 2010 today for medium-industrial sized roof-top solar projects in US sunbelt states, including inverters and grid connection, but not land or power storage. That's only a 10% decline per decade, not the 40% decline shown in the paper.

Nobody has actually built and started up a big nuclear plant in the US in several decades, so there's no real cost basis available there. China has 22 reactors under construction right now.

Re:Sure, prices will drop, but will they drop enou

[PopeRatzo]

It sounds like you're making the mistake of believing the level of technology we have today is the limit to human innovation.

The problem I have with that kind of thinking is that it's been proved wrong consistently through history.

The "molten salt" approach we're talking about is almost certainly just a step in a long curve of technological advance. You build one and the next guy finds a better, cheaper way. Then someone else comes along with something more effective than salt.

I'm not saying you're guilty of this, but I hear constantly from certain people the notion that we shouldn't consider solar energy because the technology for solar energy is somehow insufficient, assuming that unlike every area of human endeavor, there won't be further advances.

Re:And the largest solar power plant currently is.

[winwar]

"Now considering that one nuclear power station usually generates 1 to 5 GIGAwatts, and these generate in the order of TENS OF MEGAwatts, it is inconceivable to me how anyone can compare Solar to Nuclear."

Which is precisely why no nuclear power plants are being built in the US. Utilities don't need large amounts of new power all at once. They need smaller amounts over time. Solar and wind are great at supplying this incremental demand.

The utilities learned the hard way about the unreliability of future power generation predications. This led to the building off and default off many nuclear power plants in the past. If they actually need large amounts of power generating capacity they will build coal or natural gas plants because they take less time and are more economical.

Re:Not compeditive, w/ subsidization - even in Fra

[Chibi Merrow]

The Yucca mountain facility is not a waste containment center, it's a radiation containment facility that holds the items through their decomposition period.

While I believe it to be a monumentally expensive endeavor and positively way too "modern marvel"''ish, I figured I'd clear that up since the whole water running thing came into play.

I fail to see how that in any way invalidates what I said.

Our power distribution currently is a power distribution system alone and has nothing to do with how the energy is made. It's a delivery system, alone. ...

Ecologically the creation method is healthier, but solar is never to be discounted since it's inevitably ecologically free energy.

Until the sun sets, which is when a lot of demand happens, and suddenly solar isn't producing any more. This is fine for coal/natural gas/nuclear plants and even (in most cases) hydroelectric plants, as we just turn the dial up on them and get more electricity out of them. We can't do that with solar or wind power, as we don't have any control over how much they produce at any given time. Hence my comment about storage--depending on solar/wind will require massive investment in energy storage and require a major reworking of how we handle demand on the network. So, yes, it does matter where the power comes from.

Also, unless I missed some really amazing developments, solar does require materials with which to actually build the panels, some of which are not nice. Saying it's ecologically free isn't quite the truth. Better? Sure, but poisons and fossil fuels are still used in their production.

Fails the quick, are these numbers right test

[JimToo]

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html and http://www.solarbuzz.com/StatsCosts.htm and the crucial test, this article fails on my personal, does it sound like bull meter.