Slashdot Mirror
Engineers Plan The Most Expensive Object Ever Built (bbc.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Ed Davey has an interesting story at BBC about the proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset, UK which at $35 billion will be the most expensive object ever put together on Earth. For that sum you could build a small forest of Burj Khalifas -- the world's tallest building, in Dubai, which each cost $1.5 billion. You could build almost six Large Hadron Colliders, built under the border between France and Switzerland to unlock the secrets of the universe, and at a cost a mere $5.8 billion. Or you could build five Oakland Bay Bridges in San Francisco, designed to withstand the strongest earthquake seismologists would expect within the next 1,500 years at a cost of $6.5 billion...
But what about historical buildings like the the pyramids. Although working out the cost of something built more than 4,500 years ago presents numerous challenges, in 2012 the Turner Construction Company estimated it could build the Great Pyramid of Giza for $5 billion. That includes about $730 million for stone and $58 million for 12 cranes. Labor is a minor cost as it is projected that a mere staff of 600 would be necessary. In contrast, it took 20,000 people to build the original pyramid with a total of 77.6 million days' labor. Using the current Egyptian minimum wage of $5.73 a day, that gives a labor cost of $445 million. But whatever the most expensive object on Earth is, up in the sky is something that eclipses all of these things. The International Space Station. Price tag: $110 billion.
But what about historical buildings like the the pyramids. Although working out the cost of something built more than 4,500 years ago presents numerous challenges, in 2012 the Turner Construction Company estimated it could build the Great Pyramid of Giza for $5 billion. That includes about $730 million for stone and $58 million for 12 cranes. Labor is a minor cost as it is projected that a mere staff of 600 would be necessary. In contrast, it took 20,000 people to build the original pyramid with a total of 77.6 million days' labor. Using the current Egyptian minimum wage of $5.73 a day, that gives a labor cost of $445 million. But whatever the most expensive object on Earth is, up in the sky is something that eclipses all of these things. The International Space Station. Price tag: $110 billion.
- as the summary states itself, the (long ago) planned International Space Station was much more expensive than this new power plant. And the ISS is more like "one object" than the new power plant is.
The ISS link takes me to the Firefox download page. WTF?
A lot of that money has little to do with building a nuclear power plant, and much more with the cost of massive regulations and legal challenges, as well as paying off corporations, unions, and "non profits".
Of course, nuclear power economics is also different from other sources, in that most of the cost of nuclear power is in construction, not fuel or maintenance. When all is said and done, nuclear power is cost competitive even at current fossil fuel prices, and if people are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear is pretty much the only option.
Would you mind telling me anything important about the "object?" Like maybe what the fuck it's for? Is it fission or fusion? Production or research? Why does it cost so much? God damn.
Solar provides about 100w / square meter. So 35GW would need 350Million Square meters (350 Square killometers....).. About the size of the isle of white! Maybe we can make a floating island, full of solar panels....
If this thing would really cost 35 billion, there is no way in hell it would be built! It makes no sense at all.
For that amount of money, you could cover the entire Sahara desert in Solar cells. You could build loads of gas plants and wind farms which would generate massively more energy than one nuclear plant.
You could launch a bunch of cells into space and transmit the power back to earth for less money than that.
You could build a wall at the Mexico / USA border and cover it with solar cells for less money.
You could install gas bags on the ass of every cow on the planet to catch the methane gas to power a gas turbine plant than it would cost to build that thing.
It make NO damn sense.
Since we are actually comparing programs, ie power plant verses aircraft program. You Brits have got a lot to learn about wasting money. The F-35 is 1.5 trillion and climbing.[unlike the plane itself] We have the leadership in stupidity and God willing we aim to keep it.The program is so big that it will take a forest of money just to pay for it.
We need to kick nuclear to the curb. The true cost of nuclear energy to society is infinite because we have no safe way to dispose of the waste these plants create for the length of time required, on the scale of thousands to millions of years.
Nuclear waste disposal is never included in cost estimates for nuclear energy, and as a result we have it just sitting around all over the United States. We can't even contain waste safely for a few decades. How do we have any hope to contain it for 100 years, or 1,000 years, or 10,000 years? The answer is we will never be able to do it.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should be doing it. Adding more nuclear capacity just makes the waste problem worse. Who bears the brunt of the waste problem? It won't cause much harm in our lifetimes. Our descendants are the ones we're hurting.
If you want to read a more detailed technical analysis, feel free to search for my previous posts on the subject.