The calculator does not use electric data from Ventex. You must be confused with some other tool on the PVWatts web site.
> Solar irradiance info comes from another private partner.
It comes from here, on their web site:
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/
> Are you illiterate
Astonishing. You're wrong in every statement you've made, and you're asking if I'm illiterate? Geez, at least I know how to type into google, which you've proven incapable or too lazy to do.
> NREL are implausible and not verifiable or even peer reviewed
Based on what, numbers you don't even provide a source for? Yeah, good argument. Here, lets see the stellar data you present that causes you so much confusion:
"Bakersfield has twice the number of sunny days as Tampa"
Hmmm, I wonder where this came from? Oh, let me google "number of sunny days in tampa". Ahhh, you got it from Current Results. And you read the *wrong column of data*. "
Maybe you want to consider the actual definition of insolation and then read the "Total Days With Sun" instead of the "Sunny Days" column and compare. Here, I'll do it for you:
http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/California/annual-days-of-sunshine.php Bakersfield 272 http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Florida/annual-days-of-sunshine.php Tampa 244
(272-244)/272 = 10%
From PVWatts:
Bakersfield 1461 kWh/kW/year Tampa gets 1364
(1461-1364)/1461 = 6.6%
Are you *still* going to tell me those numbers look so terribly wrong to you? You understand the panels still make power on overcast days, right? And you further understand that *every single thing* you've said so far is wrong?
Isn't it wonderful that the ultra-rich can spend money and convince the non-ultra-rich like silfen here that solar power is bad for poor old people?
By the way, there have been, literally, hundreds of studies on this. The vast majority suggest the marginal cost is either flat or negative, meaning that if your imaginary rich neighbours put up panels, your power costs go *down*, not up.
> maybe you should have read a little lower on the front page before making that claim..... http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
You're absolutely right, I should have. And commented on it too. The chart on page 12 to start with, claims that wind is over $2/W, solar is ove $3.80, hydro is almost $3, and nuclear is $5. They quote the EAI as their source of data, from *April 2013a*.
Now what's wrong with that? Well the EAI, as is typical for a large government organization, runs on data collection schedules that take years. I can't get to the April 2013a report any more, but the latest one shows that the collection date was a year earlier, and therefore represents data for the year before that. In other words, the data in the Brookings report was collected during 2011 and 2012.
Now, what's wrong with *that*? Well the fact the PV costs have been falling is one issue. The financial industry has been all over this, which is why reports on this stuff tend to come from people like Lazard and Citi. If you care to look at the link I posted earlier, it shows *todays* prices instead of those from three years ago, and of course one will come to difference conclusions if the all-in price is the current average of $1.79 in the US, as opposed to Brooking's out-of-date $3.80.
Yes that's right, the cost of a commercial solar plant fell 50% in two years.
> The NREL system has no description of its methodology, data sources, or other independently verifiable information
Holy crap, are you kidding? Every single line of code, bit of data, and the entire methodology is all on their web site! There's an entire page devoted to how the thing works, and where the data comes from. As you are apparently to lazy to even read the site, here, here's the data for you:
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/pubs/redbook/
> You also picked two non-representative cities
Oh my god! Go ahead, click on every one of them if you think I'm wrong.
Seriously, are you trying to back up the statement that California gets FOUR TIMES more sunlight than Florida?!?
> Try finding a source that actually explains where its numbers come from and what they mean.
> I'm sure Bakersfield is the entire state of California.
THAT'S your comeback!?!
Go ahead, show me ANY location in California that gets FOUR TIMES the sunlight of ANY location in Florida.
In fact, I challenge you to find any location in those two states that varies by more than 50%, let alone 400%
Heck, I get less than 25% less power than Bakersfield, and I'm *in Toronto*. Geometry!
> California you can use cheaper panels because they don't have to be rated to withstand hurricane force
All panels are made to the same standards. The ones on my roof can handle Florida winds. I know, because that's where I got them. Ironically, they were made in California, in the very first solar panel plant.
> If the systems were affordable without the special arrangements and tax breaks, > this article wouldn't exist in the first place because the panels would be popping up all over Florida
They are. PV is growing at about an average 50% YoY rate for the last five years, which is about when panels started their downward price plunge.
Moreover, this article says the power companies are actively discouraging such projects, which is a direct counter to your statement.
Let me know when they cancel all the special arrangements and tax breaks for the big power companies and we'll see what happens then. You know, like this one where the power company was allowed by the government to collect extra money for a nuke plant which they then cancelled and kept $150 million of it:
"The cost for 3 cottages was quoted as 106,000 dollars"
Yeah, I can't figure that out. You might, MIGHT, be able to fit 3 kW of panels on a "cottage". At $4/W, the going rate in the US right now, that would cost you 3 cottages x (3 x 1000) x $4 = $36,000.
I can only conclude that this is a typo in the article.
> -- can very reasonably be interpreted as I did above.
Not without an obvious logical fallacy or moving goalposts. To whit:
"Along with tax breaks and other government incentives, the lease agreements have made solar installations increasingly affordable."
Which states, "affordability increases with tax breaks and other government incentives". It does not imply that the systems are not affordable without such. And as the link I provide below notes, PV is perfectly affordable in many situations without any subsidy at all.
More to the point, it says nothing whatsoever about what the "solar industry thinks they deserve". That's entirely made up by you.
" While the precise rules vary from state to state, one explanation is the same: opposition from utilities grown nervous by the rapid encroachment of solar firms on their business."
Frankly, as someone that worked in the PV industry, I don't blame them for being nervous.
Commercial PV is now cheaper than nuclear and highly competitive with both coal and NG turbines. Rooftop systems are nowhere near as competitive, but as they are on the retail side of the meter, they don't have to be. So that's one thing that's scary.
And then there's the fact that PV, especially west and south-west mounted, provides power on-peak, precisely when the companies charge the most for their power. That's where they make almost all of their profit, so this is doubly super-scary.
> Solar and wind look cheap in the surface, and can be cheap if you limit solar+wind to less than 25% of a grid's production. It's more like 20%.
And so because we're at 5%, we have a LOT of room to go.
It's even easier here in Canada, which already has 53% of it's power from hydro. We could go to 25% and thereby be 75% renewable, but due to the almost instant response of hydro, and the huge capacity we already have, we could probably go right to 90% or so. Some day I'll figure out how to run those numbers.
> But solar and wind CANNOT BE USED AS BASELINE POWER. PERIOD.
You are aware, of course, that this cuts both ways, right? Most nukes can't throttle more than maybe 20% daily, and as a result you *have* to have some sort of peaker supply available for the 50 to 75% peak load.
That supply is generally a natural gas turbine. And since those now generate power for less than a nuke, you just use them instead. Which is precisely what everyone across North America is doing, as they decomm their nukes and coal plants and replace them with NG turbines.
BTW, base load is currently selling for about 3 cents, a price point nukes simply can't hit.
Yes. Ask anyone in the industry. Even the bunker mentality isn't enough to disguise the state of the industry.
> Is that why dozens of new reactors are under construction worldwide
Can you honestly say that you believe these claims, the ones you point to? Here, lets go down the list on the page you noted:
"In the USA there are plans for 13 new reactors"
- there are currently two new reactors actually under construction, with all other plans on hold or cancelled outright. Companies are shutting down their nuclear divisions, and engineers are leaving the industry. Or, ask the *exactl same organization* for their take on the matter: "Ten other nuclear plants (13 reactors) are considered (at the start of 2014) to be at risk of closure".
"In Canada there are plans to build up to 2200 MWe or more of new capacity at Darlington in Ontario"
- these plans were cancelled *before* this page was prepared. AECL, the designer, no longer even has a commercial reactor team, they were sold off at a loss to an engineering firm more famous for corruption scandals than nuclear work.
"In Finland, construction is now under way on a fifth, very large reactor which will come on line in 2014, and plans are firming for another large one to follow it"
- Construction shut down in 2014 due to MASSIVE cost overruns and other complaints. The current estimate is 2018–2020 at the earliest, and the best case scenario is at five times over budget. The follow-up plans are dead.
"France is building a similar 1600 MWe unit at Flamanville, for operation from 2016"
- Currently delayed until at least 2016, as noted in 2012, before this page was written. Three times over budget and no sign of that going anywhere but up.
" and a second may follow it at Penly."
- Cancelled.
"In the UK, four similar 1600 MWe units are planned for operation by 2019, and a further 6000 MWe is proposed."
- Two of the three companies involved cancelled. The third has claims to continue, but refused to agree to a final price. The entire build is up in the air.
Etc etc. Flip to the table at the end and look up each one in turn. Almost all of them are canceled, mothballed, or late. Almost every one went over budget.
The entire Chinese expansion is on hold following the Sichuan earthquake and Fukishima - you don't want the people who can't make a single-story school stand up in an 8.0mag building your reactors. South Korea is currently putting many of its nuclear officers in jail for faking engineering studies and safety tests, which has cast something of a chill on their industry. India claims they're still working on a thorium design, for the last 40 years or so. All three, especially China, are installing wind turbines at a much faster rate. The same is true for the entire world.
> many existing power plants have been upgraded to produce more power
*Because it's dying.* No one will invest in a new plant, so they're using what capital they have to put the existing ones on life support.
> It costs more going in, but you get more coming out.
That is highly debatable. A nuclear plant built today will certainly cost more up front, AND is highly likely to be more expensive as well.
Nukes are easy to model economically because the fuel costs are vanishing in overall LCoE terms. In that respect they're more like a wind turbine than a coal plant. Sp basically it comes down to CAPEX, interest rates and building times.
Reactors, like anything *big*, take a long time to build. Darlington B's timeline was 12 to 15 years when I last saw it (they nixed it). Now you don't get any money back for those 15 years, but you're paying in the whole time. So you model it all up and it looks good. And then something happens and the schedule slips. A 25% slip, totally reasonable, is 3.75 years of interest payments on the CAPEX while the economic value of the power you'll eventually get back goes down with inflation. And then Darlington A happens, which can operate until the sun goes out before it will pay back the interest payments. I believe Vogtle A might be close in that regard.
Now compare this with wind. You can go from initial plans to running turbine in under a year. Heck, for solar, you can do it in two weeks in Germany. So lets say you run all your numbers and it looks like everything is cool, but then there's a 25% schedule slip. That's a couple of weeks of extra interest and inflation, unmeasurable.
There is a time dimension to risk. Larger projects are *always* economically more risky. There's no way around it. The bankers look at their spreadsheets, notice the wild fluctuations in the sensitivity columns, and walk away. They've been doing that for decades.
Right. Now quantify the total money lost. I believe that stands currently at somewhere around $500 billion for the former (all in, direct cleanup was about $15 billion but that was using Soviet accounting) and the current expectations on the latter are around $150 to $250 billion (about $80 billion in so far, $137 billion just for the plant is already on the books).
Now add those to the total price of building the reactors in the first place. There's about 400 power reactors, so that's somewhere between $1 and $2 billion per plant. The average plant is maybe 1GWe, so that's about $1 to $2 per watt.
So in other words, the cleanup costs alone cost more than a modern NG plant or wind turbine. And then there's the $5 to $8/W CAPEX on top of that.
Which is precisely why no one is building reactors, and everyone is building gas plants and wind turbines.
> right now, we have the anti-nuclear people saying the sky is falling
Ahh, my favourite tired old bromide.
Anti-nuclear people didn't stop nuclear power. Repeat that until it sinks in, because it's true.
Spiralling costs, which over doubled in the 2000s alone, stopped nuclear power.
It was always expensive, now it's "are you fugging kidding me" expensive. Here, turn to page 8:
"the game now contains a number of programmed default paths, directories, and file names that didn't previously exist"
Let me guess: on the Mac, they're in your Library folder, so you can't put the game files anywhere but your user account, which means you can't fit your user account on the SSD.
Slashdot Mirror
> Bullshit. The app is closed source
I didn't say open source, I said it was available on their web site:
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/calculators/PVWATTS/version1/US/code/C/pvwattz_hr.c
> Electric data comes from Ventex
The calculator does not use electric data from Ventex. You must be confused with some other tool on the PVWatts web site.
> Solar irradiance info comes from another private partner.
It comes from here, on their web site:
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/
> Are you illiterate
Astonishing. You're wrong in every statement you've made, and you're asking if I'm illiterate? Geez, at least I know how to type into google, which you've proven incapable or too lazy to do.
> NREL are implausible and not verifiable or even peer reviewed
Based on what, numbers you don't even provide a source for? Yeah, good argument. Here, lets see the stellar data you present that causes you so much confusion:
"Bakersfield has twice the number of sunny days as Tampa"
Hmmm, I wonder where this came from? Oh, let me google "number of sunny days in tampa". Ahhh, you got it from Current Results. And you read the *wrong column of data*. "
Maybe you want to consider the actual definition of insolation and then read the "Total Days With Sun" instead of the "Sunny Days" column and compare. Here, I'll do it for you:
http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/California/annual-days-of-sunshine.php
Bakersfield 272
http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Florida/annual-days-of-sunshine.php
Tampa 244
(272-244)/272 = 10%
From PVWatts:
Bakersfield 1461 kWh/kW/year
Tampa gets 1364
(1461-1364)/1461 = 6.6%
Are you *still* going to tell me those numbers look so terribly wrong to you? You understand the panels still make power on overcast days, right? And you further understand that *every single thing* you've said so far is wrong?
> Considering that Solar panels only have a effective life span of 15 years
Somewhere between 50 and 100 years, we don't know because the earliest ones are still working fine:
http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/testing-thirty-year-old-photovoltaic-module
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf
http://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2013/oktober/predicting-the-life-expectancy-of-solar-modules-7.html
And when they are done, they go right into the blue bin. They're about 99.9% recyclable using existing technology.
> Here is someone who has devoted his career to grid stability, understands it completely -- and what is his own take?
Geez, you're quoting someone at a thorium power conference? Who cares what his take is?
Let's look around and see what we can see... hmmm, Ars has a whole collection:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/03/variable-renewable-power-can-reach-40-percent-capacity-very-cheaply/
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/the-grid-of-2030-all-renewable-90-percent-of-the-time/
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/09/cost-of-the-variability-of-renewable-energy-is-dwarfed-by-the-savings/
Oh geez, this guy is quoting a bogus argument invented by the Koch brothers.
What, you don't believe me?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/opinion/sunday/the-koch-attack-on-solar-energy.html?_r=0
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-koch-brothers-and-solar-power-20140422-story.html
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/wont-anyone-think-of-the-seniors/
Isn't it wonderful that the ultra-rich can spend money and convince the non-ultra-rich like silfen here that solar power is bad for poor old people?
By the way, there have been, literally, hundreds of studies on this. The vast majority suggest the marginal cost is either flat or negative, meaning that if your imaginary rich neighbours put up panels, your power costs go *down*, not up.
> Without the government footing so much of the bill the utility wouldn't buy any of the power.
Well duh.
You: Here, power company, I'd like to sell you the power I made off my roof so that you don't get to sell me all your juicy on-peak
Unicorn fairy dust power company: We'll get right on that sir! We want to lose money as fast as possible!
Real power company: We gots yer power RIGHT HERE! Now screw off while I get back to solitaire on my Win98 box.
> maybe you should have read a little lower on the front page before making that claim..... http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
You're absolutely right, I should have. And commented on it too. The chart on page 12 to start with, claims that wind is over $2/W, solar is ove $3.80, hydro is almost $3, and nuclear is $5. They quote the EAI as their source of data, from *April 2013a*.
Now what's wrong with that? Well the EAI, as is typical for a large government organization, runs on data collection schedules that take years. I can't get to the April 2013a report any more, but the latest one shows that the collection date was a year earlier, and therefore represents data for the year before that. In other words, the data in the Brookings report was collected during 2011 and 2012.
Now, what's wrong with *that*? Well the fact the PV costs have been falling is one issue. The financial industry has been all over this, which is why reports on this stuff tend to come from people like Lazard and Citi. If you care to look at the link I posted earlier, it shows *todays* prices instead of those from three years ago, and of course one will come to difference conclusions if the all-in price is the current average of $1.79 in the US, as opposed to Brooking's out-of-date $3.80.
Yes that's right, the cost of a commercial solar plant fell 50% in two years.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/age-of-renewables-why-shale-gas-wont-kill-wind-or-solar-54691
And just so it's handy, here's the original report. Note that page 2 is *unsubsidized numbers*:
http://gallery.mailchimp.com/ce17780900c3d223633ecfa59/files/Lazard_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_v7.0.1.pdf
Even then, we were selling complete off-grid systems for those McMansion cottages for $25,000. Storage included.
> The NREL system has no description of its methodology, data sources, or other independently verifiable information
Holy crap, are you kidding? Every single line of code, bit of data, and the entire methodology is all on their web site! There's an entire page devoted to how the thing works, and where the data comes from. As you are apparently to lazy to even read the site, here, here's the data for you:
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/pubs/redbook/
> You also picked two non-representative cities
Oh my god! Go ahead, click on every one of them if you think I'm wrong.
Seriously, are you trying to back up the statement that California gets FOUR TIMES more sunlight than Florida?!?
> Try finding a source that actually explains where its numbers come from and what they mean.
OMG
http://bit.ly/XU3ibi
> I'm sure Bakersfield is the entire state of California.
THAT'S your comeback!?!
Go ahead, show me ANY location in California that gets FOUR TIMES the sunlight of ANY location in Florida.
In fact, I challenge you to find any location in those two states that varies by more than 50%, let alone 400%
Heck, I get less than 25% less power than Bakersfield, and I'm *in Toronto*. Geometry!
> California you can use cheaper panels because they don't have to be rated to withstand hurricane force
All panels are made to the same standards. The ones on my roof can handle Florida winds. I know, because that's where I got them. Ironically, they were made in California, in the very first solar panel plant.
> You aren't considering weather.
*sigh*
Solar insolation numbers *include all effects including weather*. Did you even bother to click the link before playing the fool?
> The price of electricity from the grid at $0.08 / kWh in Minneapolis
Really? Is that all-in, taxes included?
That's a lot lower than here, I'm paying a shade under 15 cents in Toronto.
> If the systems were affordable without the special arrangements and tax breaks,
> this article wouldn't exist in the first place because the panels would be popping up all over Florida
They are. PV is growing at about an average 50% YoY rate for the last five years, which is about when panels started their downward price plunge.
http://www.irecusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Solar-Report-Final-July-2013-1.pdf
Sorry, it's email-walled.
Moreover, this article says the power companies are actively discouraging such projects, which is a direct counter to your statement.
Let me know when they cancel all the special arrangements and tax breaks for the big power companies and we'll see what happens then. You know, like this one where the power company was allowed by the government to collect extra money for a nuke plant which they then cancelled and kept $150 million of it:
http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/energy/duke-energy-to-cancel-proposed-levy-county-nuclear-plant-fasano-says/2134287
> Florida gets half to one quarter the solar energy at the rooftop that California
Where did you POSSIBLY come up with that?!
Bakersfield gets 1461 kWh/kW/year
Tampa gets 1364 kWh/kW/year
Here, do it yourself if you don't believe me:
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/calculators/pvwatts/version1/
"The cost for 3 cottages was quoted as 106,000 dollars"
Yeah, I can't figure that out. You might, MIGHT, be able to fit 3 kW of panels on a "cottage". At $4/W, the going rate in the US right now, that would cost you 3 cottages x (3 x 1000) x $4 = $36,000.
I can only conclude that this is a typo in the article.
> -- can very reasonably be interpreted as I did above.
Not without an obvious logical fallacy or moving goalposts. To whit:
"Along with tax breaks and other government incentives, the lease agreements have made solar installations increasingly affordable."
Which states, "affordability increases with tax breaks and other government incentives". It does not imply that the systems are not affordable without such. And as the link I provide below notes, PV is perfectly affordable in many situations without any subsidy at all.
More to the point, it says nothing whatsoever about what the "solar industry thinks they deserve". That's entirely made up by you.
" While the precise rules vary from state to state, one explanation is the same: opposition from utilities grown nervous by the rapid encroachment of solar firms on their business."
Frankly, as someone that worked in the PV industry, I don't blame them for being nervous.
Commercial PV is now cheaper than nuclear and highly competitive with both coal and NG turbines. Rooftop systems are nowhere near as competitive, but as they are on the retail side of the meter, they don't have to be. So that's one thing that's scary.
And then there's the fact that PV, especially west and south-west mounted, provides power on-peak, precisely when the companies charge the most for their power. That's where they make almost all of their profit, so this is doubly super-scary.
> Solar and wind look cheap in the surface, and can be cheap if you limit solar+wind to less than 25% of a grid's production. It's more like 20%.
And so because we're at 5%, we have a LOT of room to go.
It's even easier here in Canada, which already has 53% of it's power from hydro. We could go to 25% and thereby be 75% renewable, but due to the almost instant response of hydro, and the huge capacity we already have, we could probably go right to 90% or so. Some day I'll figure out how to run those numbers.
> But solar and wind CANNOT BE USED AS BASELINE POWER. PERIOD.
You are aware, of course, that this cuts both ways, right? Most nukes can't throttle more than maybe 20% daily, and as a result you *have* to have some sort of peaker supply available for the 50 to 75% peak load.
That supply is generally a natural gas turbine. And since those now generate power for less than a nuke, you just use them instead. Which is precisely what everyone across North America is doing, as they decomm their nukes and coal plants and replace them with NG turbines.
BTW, base load is currently selling for about 3 cents, a price point nukes simply can't hit.
> Nuclear is dying?
Yes. Ask anyone in the industry. Even the bunker mentality isn't enough to disguise the state of the industry.
> Is that why dozens of new reactors are under construction worldwide
Can you honestly say that you believe these claims, the ones you point to? Here, lets go down the list on the page you noted:
"In the USA there are plans for 13 new reactors"
- there are currently two new reactors actually under construction, with all other plans on hold or cancelled outright. Companies are shutting down their nuclear divisions, and engineers are leaving the industry. Or, ask the *exactl same organization* for their take on the matter: "Ten other nuclear plants (13 reactors) are considered (at the start of 2014) to be at risk of closure".
"In Canada there are plans to build up to 2200 MWe or more of new capacity at Darlington in Ontario"
- these plans were cancelled *before* this page was prepared. AECL, the designer, no longer even has a commercial reactor team, they were sold off at a loss to an engineering firm more famous for corruption scandals than nuclear work.
"In Finland, construction is now under way on a fifth, very large reactor which will come on line in 2014, and plans are firming for another large one to follow it"
- Construction shut down in 2014 due to MASSIVE cost overruns and other complaints. The current estimate is 2018–2020 at the earliest, and the best case scenario is at five times over budget. The follow-up plans are dead.
"France is building a similar 1600 MWe unit at Flamanville, for operation from 2016"
- Currently delayed until at least 2016, as noted in 2012, before this page was written. Three times over budget and no sign of that going anywhere but up.
" and a second may follow it at Penly."
- Cancelled.
"In the UK, four similar 1600 MWe units are planned for operation by 2019, and a further 6000 MWe is proposed."
- Two of the three companies involved cancelled. The third has claims to continue, but refused to agree to a final price. The entire build is up in the air.
Etc etc. Flip to the table at the end and look up each one in turn. Almost all of them are canceled, mothballed, or late. Almost every one went over budget.
The entire Chinese expansion is on hold following the Sichuan earthquake and Fukishima - you don't want the people who can't make a single-story school stand up in an 8.0mag building your reactors. South Korea is currently putting many of its nuclear officers in jail for faking engineering studies and safety tests, which has cast something of a chill on their industry. India claims they're still working on a thorium design, for the last 40 years or so. All three, especially China, are installing wind turbines at a much faster rate. The same is true for the entire world.
> many existing power plants have been upgraded to produce more power
*Because it's dying.* No one will invest in a new plant, so they're using what capital they have to put the existing ones on life support.
> It costs more going in, but you get more coming out.
That is highly debatable. A nuclear plant built today will certainly cost more up front, AND is highly likely to be more expensive as well.
Nukes are easy to model economically because the fuel costs are vanishing in overall LCoE terms. In that respect they're more like a wind turbine than a coal plant. Sp basically it comes down to CAPEX, interest rates and building times.
Reactors, like anything *big*, take a long time to build. Darlington B's timeline was 12 to 15 years when I last saw it (they nixed it). Now you don't get any money back for those 15 years, but you're paying in the whole time. So you model it all up and it looks good. And then something happens and the schedule slips. A 25% slip, totally reasonable, is 3.75 years of interest payments on the CAPEX while the economic value of the power you'll eventually get back goes down with inflation. And then Darlington A happens, which can operate until the sun goes out before it will pay back the interest payments. I believe Vogtle A might be close in that regard.
Now compare this with wind. You can go from initial plans to running turbine in under a year. Heck, for solar, you can do it in two weeks in Germany. So lets say you run all your numbers and it looks like everything is cool, but then there's a 25% schedule slip. That's a couple of weeks of extra interest and inflation, unmeasurable.
There is a time dimension to risk. Larger projects are *always* economically more risky. There's no way around it. The bankers look at their spreadsheets, notice the wild fluctuations in the sensitivity columns, and walk away. They've been doing that for decades.
> We don't need to talk about costs at all
> We need to talk about watts, mega-watt hours
Wow. I can't imagine a statement more at odds with reality.
When you've finished created this money-free world, you can come and pick me up on your unicorn.
Oh snap!
Get it?
> For each we can quantify the total lives lost
Right. Now quantify the total money lost. I believe that stands currently at somewhere around $500 billion for the former (all in, direct cleanup was about $15 billion but that was using Soviet accounting) and the current expectations on the latter are around $150 to $250 billion (about $80 billion in so far, $137 billion just for the plant is already on the books).
Now add those to the total price of building the reactors in the first place. There's about 400 power reactors, so that's somewhere between $1 and $2 billion per plant. The average plant is maybe 1GWe, so that's about $1 to $2 per watt.
So in other words, the cleanup costs alone cost more than a modern NG plant or wind turbine. And then there's the $5 to $8/W CAPEX on top of that.
Which is precisely why no one is building reactors, and everyone is building gas plants and wind turbines.
> right now, we have the anti-nuclear people saying the sky is falling
Ahh, my favourite tired old bromide.
Anti-nuclear people didn't stop nuclear power. Repeat that until it sinks in, because it's true.
Spiralling costs, which over doubled in the 2000s alone, stopped nuclear power.
It was always expensive, now it's "are you fugging kidding me" expensive. Here, turn to page 8:
http://gallery.mailchimp.com/ce17780900c3d223633ecfa59/files/Lazard_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_v7.0.1.pdf
"the game now contains a number of programmed default paths, directories, and file names that didn't previously exist"
Let me guess: on the Mac, they're in your Library folder, so you can't put the game files anywhere but your user account, which means you can't fit your user account on the SSD.
Yay.
What, people thought the open source movement of the 2000s was due to some sort of hippy movement?
No, it was due to IT departments becoming redundant and the engineers spending that time very effectively.
That wave has crested.