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

Conditions Apply

[Anonymous Coward]

Except during nights.

Re:Conditions Apply

[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.

Re:Conditions Apply

[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

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.

Re:Conditions Apply

[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.

Re:Conditions Apply

[TwiztidK]

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

Re:Conditions Apply

[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?

Re:Conditions Apply

[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.

Re:Conditions Apply

[Wonko the Sane]

Or even build reactors that reprocess internally.

Re:Conditions Apply

[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.

Re:Conditions Apply

[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.

Re:Conditions Apply

[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 ...)

Re:Conditions Apply

[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.

Re:Conditions Apply

[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.)

Re:Conditions Apply

[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.

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...

Re:USD per watt and watts per sqm

[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.

Re:USD per watt and watts per sqm

[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.

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

[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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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: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: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: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: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).

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."

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.

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).

Batteries?

[msauve]

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