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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.
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.
At 23 trees that IS a very small forest.
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No mention of the great train project in California?
That will be a budget buster for sure. especially by the time all the bonds and loans are paid off......
And the Bay Bridge is falling apart!
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- 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.
Imagine how much the mice had to pay Magreia to build the Earth.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
What a load of rubbish. Slashdot posters repeatedly inform me that nuclear is cheap and widely scalable while renewables are way too expensive.
They've also kindly let me know that the reason that nuclear power plants go so ridiculously over budget is because of NIMBYs, nothing to do with the cost of engineering, construction difficulties, etc.
"I know you have questions." "That would be why I just asked them."
It took me exactly 30 seconds;
http://money.cnn.com/gallery/n...
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.
Hinkley point is only going to produce 3.2GW ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Judging from the headline, Apple's about to announce a new product.
You are welcome on my lawn.
According to one US presidential candidate, now out of the race, the pyramids were used to store grain. I could add a large number of comments regarding the state of a lot of things in the US, but they're pretty obvious.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Hinkley Point C is planned to be 3,200MWe nuclear reactor complex/waste storage faqcility. One needs to build a lot more of them before you get even close to powering the UK, let alone keeping up with reactors being retired. All it takes is one major incident, Loss of (Electricity,Coolant,Skilled People), to render a size-able portion of the UK unfit for human habitation.
Meanwhile any solar and/or wind power related incident is localised to a few hundred sq meters and can be cleaned(recycled) up in a week.
.
Those were GE designs built by an inferior Japanese contractor, from an old design, which TEPCO then chose to locate the generators downhill instead of uphill from the reactor buildings, and never updated their storm walls, as they were ordered to 7-9 times (exact number is uncertain: at least 7 times, however).
That certain seems like a GE problem to me. NOT.
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.
All it takes is one major incident, Loss of (Electricity,Coolant,Skilled People), to render a size-able portion of the UK unfit for human habitation.
So, basically, unfit for human habitation, like Lutton, Stoke-on-Trent, and Grimsby, then.
Everything pales in comparison to large military contracts.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
You make no sense, I don't think you realize what you just said. I am just stating facts, not coordinating anything. There is a reason why credible comparisons of energy cost are done per MWh . If you are not comparing levelized cost per MWh, you are not comparing the cost of energy produced.
KW is a rate of energy production, like Mile per Hour (MPH) is a rate of distance travel. If you want to know how many miles you traveled, you need MPH times hours, and if you want to know how much energy you produce, you need to know KW times hours, of KWh. Its simple math.
Again, KW does not represent an amount of energy, KWH does. Its easy to look up how this works.
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/...
https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/...
"it took 20,000 people to build the original pyramid with a total of 77.6 million days' labor. "
That would be MAN days.
A lot of California is unpopulated desert so those density numbers are very misleading - laughably so. You should have a word with whoever misled you with such an argument and a laugh at yourself for falling for it.
What really matters is the population density in areas where you want to put a station or terminal. It may still be far too low, I do not know, but the numbers above are totally irrelevant and just make people using them look silly.
Here is all the facts you need to know in two quotes and a formula. Start with a quote from this article:
"proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset, UK which at $35 billion will be the most expensive object ever put together on Earth"
and now from the Wiki:
"Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is a project to construct a 3,200 MWe nuclear power station"
And now it's time for our formula. In the power industry, we are very very interested in the CAPEX, expressed in terms of dollar-per-watt. In this case:
CAPEX = 35 billion / 3.2 billion = $11/W
Why is that everything you need to know? Well I lied, it's *almost* everything. The other bit is this:
Commercial PV: $1.50
Commercial wind: $1.40
Gas co-gen: $1.15
All numbers up-to-date within about 6 months, taken from real-world projects and summarized on page 11 here:
https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf
And that's basically that. If you consider a modern wind turbine with a CF of 32%, and the Hinkley reactors with a CF of 90%, then you get relative LCoE's of:
Hinkley : 11 / 0.9 = 12.2
Wind: 1.40 / 0.32 = 4.38
Which means wind is about three times cheaper than nuclear. It's actually more than that because there's no fuel cost and OPEX is lower.
And that, dear reader, is why nuclear is dead.